If self is a location, so is love.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.

The end of art is peace.

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.