“My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.”

“I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.”

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

“For better or worse, poetry is my life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.”

“Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.”

“Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.”

“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.”

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