Turtle has just one plan at a time, and every cell buys into it.

Every time somebody writes a theory about where literature's going, that person is not only contributing thought but nudging things to happen in one way or the other. Just as in painting, there's much more interest in the American scene painters and the early American... like the Ashcan school of painters. Who would have thought, 50 years ago, that Norman Rockwell would again be considered a serious painter? And yet, there are a lot of people who are saying Rockwell was a very accomplished technician. These things are constantly moving.

There's always been what I would call the William Carlos Williams strain, in which poems of simplicity and clarity are valued by a different community. I was talking to Galway Kinnell one day, and he said that there was an audience for poetry up until about 1920 and then, from that point on, the poets and the critics drifted.

I farm a little plot of things to say, with not much frontage on the busy road.

If I don't take the risk, I'll wind up with a bloodless poem. I have to be out there on the edge.

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.