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

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.

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 am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

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.