If you look at the Directory of American Poets and Writers, you know there are hundreds of poets in New York City. So therefore, just by specific gravity, it seems like a more significant place. Robert Wrigley is a poet who lives in rural Idaho - I think it's really back-country Idaho - and he writes beautiful poems.

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.

I like the idea of there being times when even words cost so much you used them sparingly. I have known a lot of old men and women who talked as if they were paying Western Union by the word.

a happy birthday this evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness. I could easily have switched on a lamp, but I wanted to ride the day down into night, to sit alone, and smooth the unreadable page with the pale gray ghost of my hand

When she left me I stood out in the thunderstorm, hoping to be destroyed by lightning. It missed, first left, then right.

Sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful.