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

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

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.

Keeping a journal is like taking good care of one’s heart.

Somebody comes to my house and admires what I've done, sometimes I just give it to them. Because I don't want to get it all tied up in all that professional stuff because I have to do that as a writer. I don't need that. I need something like painting, where I can just play.

A poem is a record of a discovery.

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