There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

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

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.