All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.

You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.

I can still remember the feel in my hand of that most wonderful American coin ever minted, a nickel with a buffalo on one side and the head of an Indian on the other. That nickel was a daily proof of our country's past. Bring it back!

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

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