Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.

Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

One of the duties of a baseball fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him.

Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved