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.

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

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

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.

Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.