As Henry Moore carvedor modelled his sculpture every day,he strove to surpass Donatello4. and failed, but woke the next morningelated for another try.
One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.
It’s almost relaxing to know I’ll die fairly soon, as it’s a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.
My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.
Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.
I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don’t try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.
Not everything in old age is grim. I haven’t walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.
Everything important always begins from something trivial.
As I grew older – collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five – poetry abandoned me.
Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line – to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.
After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter – an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.
I’ve always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was… I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
Poetry is what I’ve done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
In my life, I’ve seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.
When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.
Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.