The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

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.

There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.

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

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.