The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.

Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches.