One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.