The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

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.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.