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

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

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.

Wallace Stevens had more time to write as an insurance agent. He was a bond lawyer and I know that insurance company lawyers don't have to do nearly as much as we had to do. We were out more in the production area. I'm not condemning Stevens for having had a better job than I did, but that's one of the many places where I differ from him.

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.

A poem is a record of a discovery.

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.