One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

Tunney has all the makings of a hero – he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking – but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection.

Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

It is difficult to suddenly give up a long love. Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem

His anger is easily excited and appeased, and he changes from hour to hour.

Ceaseless work, analysis, reflection, writing much, endless self-correction, that is my secret.

Wouldn't the world be a cleaner place if we gave blind people brooms instead of canes?

There are a lot of good memories, and because I was injured, during the rehab, I met my wife. The tennis was very good but the injuries were good for something too

Being alone onstage is like legalized insanity.

Where you place your focus, there will be your Heart and that will be the Spiritual Heart.

As a community of artists, we might just keep safe each other's love affair.