The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

Poetry is language in orbit.

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.

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.