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.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

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

I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.

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.