Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.

When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, "Well, what have you failed to do?" And my answer to myself was almost everything.

Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.