 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 like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones. |
| A lot happens by accident in poetry. |
| Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful. |
| The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me. |
| 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 am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know. |
| Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it. |
| When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had. |
| 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. |
| Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed. |
| The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened. |
| I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. |
| I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier. |
| I have a plot, but not much happens. |
| 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. |
| History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without. |
