Im a firm believer in learning by heart.

Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.

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

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

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.

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.