A poem is a record of a discovery.

My colleagues knew I was writing poems. I never hid it from them. I don't think they ever thought I was cheating on them. So, I think they probably saw it as being rather peculiar, that I was doing that sort of thing, but nobody ever suggested I shouldn't be doing it. I think that would be different on Madison Avenue or Wall Street, where you're really expected to be doing 110 percent for the company.

When I was a kid, I suppose I got more praise for being able to draw things and paint things than I did for my little amateur poems I was writing. But the thing that I'm trying to do with my painting is that I'm trying to keep it in the realm of pleasure. I don't show my work, I don't try to sell it.

If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly big names in contemporary poetry and who write a book and I might like three or four poems in the book, but the rest of them don't appeal to me personally; but I think that's the way it really ought to be. I think it's really a rare thing to like everything that somebody has written.

In my work, I really try to look at ordinary things quite closely to see if there isn't a little bit of something special about them. I'm trying to make something as nearly perfect as I can out of words.

I had in effect been thrown out of graduate school because I was a lousy graduate student, and I had to find a job, and I took the first job that came along. It happened to be a management trainee job in a life insurance company, and I just stayed. It was always, mainly, the idea was that I would support myself as a writer, and I knew I would have to have some sort of work, and it didn't make a whole lot of difference to me what it was. I mean, I could have been a paper hanger or something for that matter.

A poem is a record of a discovery.