Poet

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.