Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.

Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't making enough of an effort to reconcile the contradictions of life. All you get is sweet monotonous flow. Writer's block is nothing to commit suicide over. It simply indicates some imbalance between your experience and your art, and I think that's constructive.

...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.

I like an ending that's both a door and a window.

One critic wrote . . . that my poems sounded as though they had been translated from the Hungarian. I don't know why, but somehow that made me feel quite lighthearted.

To conquer a piece of earth and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot be separated from the earth. I come out of the garden every day feeling, oh, inspired in a way that one needs in order to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself.

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.