Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.