A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironi…

- J. D. Mcclatchy

No poem should be an urn to contain a meaning, but a net to catch what meanings float through the day.

- J. D. Mcclatchy

The best criticism is the sort that tells you what you already know but had been reluctant to accuse yourself of.

- J. D. Mcclatchy

To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves.

- J. D. Mcclatchy

Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.

- J. D. Mcclatchy

I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order-of feeling as well as argument-to a poem. But a…

- J. D. Mcclatchy

At least since Darwin's day, we have known that all of us originally emerged from the sea. That fact may account for our abiding fascination with it,…

- J. D. Mcclatchy