To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.

Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.

What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate.

The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.

A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.

He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.

If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.