Poet

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

I don't have a computer. I never have had one.

When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date.

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia.

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

We approached Athens from the north in early twilight, climbing a hill. When we reached its peak, we were dazzled to look down and see the Acropolis struck by one beam of the setting sun, as if posing for a picture.

A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s.

As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago.

Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.

There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut - during the school time of year - but I preferred it in New Hampshire. I preferred the culture, the landscape, the relative solitude. I've always loved it.

After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.

Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat.

I think my very best work came out when I was about 60, not when I was 20. I was publishing all the time when I was in my 20s, and some of those poems I still like. And there were a few after 60, and in my 70s, that I like. But they became fewer and fewer.

It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not 'pass away.'

By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press.