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

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power..

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….

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 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 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,….

I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Revie….

But maybe it's up the hills or under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is only part o….

Contrary to slanderous Eastern opinion, much of Iowa is not flat, but rolling hills country with a lot of timber, a handsome and imaginative landscap….

Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we li….