I have a plot, but not much happens.

Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.

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

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.