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.

If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.

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

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.

There is much appeal for me in Eastern religion, the little I know of it. And something thorny in me finds American adaptations of Buddhism terribly self-indulgent, silly, gooey in the way the English call "wet."

Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.