Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

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.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

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

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging

The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.

The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.