Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

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

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things 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.