The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence. [...] For me, the intimate teachers have not only taught me how to make things, they have represented some qualities of mind and mindfulness that I would like to have.

It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea - that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship.

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.