"I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum."

“Intense love always leads to mourning.”

“You have to live your life if you're going to do original work. Your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you're making a terrible mistake. When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art. I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly—the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn't given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don't teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching—the minute I had obligations in the world—I started to write again.”

“One of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.”

“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.”

“She was in my poetry seminar at Columbia and I felt that then her poetry was tremendously involved with a kind of female anger but also victimization which I think is something that really has to come out in poetry, but it's not primarily what I would hope to find in women's poems in the future. I'd like to find something much more complicated and dense. But I think there's going to be a lot of that anger in poetry and some of it will be very powerful poetry.”

“The poem will not survive on content but through voice. By voice I mean the style of thought, for which a style of speech never convincingly substitutes.”