One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.