The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

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

Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.

Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.

When I was teaching, I gave a lot of my mind and anxiety to it. There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over.

Walk on air against your better judgement.

Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.