I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.

When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation.

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.