Babies are not brought by storks, and poets are not produced by workshops.

With the mistake your life goes in reverse.

Now you can see exactly what you did

Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before

And each mistake leads back to something worse.

One door opens on love

And one door opens on death....

Turn the handle, hold your breath.

That’s the way people go. They have a powerful experience and they use it to interpret, rightly or wrongly, what happens later in the rest of the world.

The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.

The poem that says "I love you" is the little black cocktail dress, the classic thing that everyone would like to have written one of.

The way to learn to write poetry is: to write poetry. So we pass directly from the aspiration to the activity itself.

Self-publishing was quite a good idea if you were a poet, because it’s doable. And it’s better not to sit and let the resentments grow just because you’re not being published by a big American house.

Poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects--love, death, war.

Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done.

A properly written poem should have, implicit in its writing, the best indications as to how it should be read--how it should be interpreted is another matter, but the plainest pointer to how it should be read, built into the text, is what makes a poem a poem.