I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State….

Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architec….

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat..

Corncobs are the greatest fire-making tinder..

There must be an alternative between Hollywood and New York, between those two places psychically as well as geographically. The University of Iowa t….

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That mean….

I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but t….

When your first marriage goes into tragedy, you become very battle-scarred... I even thought of suicide. Luckily, I had known some happy marriages..

Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they w….

All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and….

Soldiers of the American Revolution fought that 18th century war with heavy muskets. In the early 20th century, we kids fought it every Fourth of Jul….

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love..

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate,….

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power..

The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poe….

Touch was important. The evening of the Third of July we would go around the neighborhood and look at the fireworks others had bought, taking them ou….

Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid..

Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses..

Our small ears never had such a workout as on the Fourth of July, hearing not only our own bursting crackers but also those of our friends, and often….

A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first….

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed..