An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond... a good feeling about his art.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

My poems - like my family life, my life with friends, my teaching - these things express who I am. I don't feel any extra responsibilities or relishes or necessary evils in them. They are part of who I am, with all of those customary desires and doubts, purposes and confusions that come along with being a particular person.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.

An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond... a good feeling about his art.