I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.