The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite – embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
There’s a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.
In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.
Write the poem only you can write.
Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.
Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn’t give public readings very often, certainly not – there was no circuit of schools.
I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we’re drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There’s always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I’d say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it’s too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.
I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can’t quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.
But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.
The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who’s ever had a job – in fact, we’re pretending to be serious now, more or less.
Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.
And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of day italicizing everything it touches...