Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.

When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.

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.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.