Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine..

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand….

Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard..

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems..

You know how, when you fly from coast to coast on a really clear day, looking down from many miles up, you can see the little baseball diamonds every….

Less is more, in prose as in architecture..

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will n….

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you ha….

For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass p….

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best..

We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other..

Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence..

I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that ever….

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers..

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up s….

Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion..

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can..

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather d….

Some of us are darkness lovers. We do not dislike the early and late daylight of June, but we cherish the increasing dark of November, which we wrap ….

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers….

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful….