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.

The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

All poetry comes from repetition.

It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

This rose became a bandanna, which became a house, which became infused with all passion, which became a hideaway, which became yes I would like to have dinner, which became hands, which became lands, shores, beaches, natives on the stones, staring and wild beasts in the trees, chasing the hats of lost hunters, and all this deserves a tone.

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