“You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.”
“One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.”
“The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has kinetic force, it sets in motion . . . [ellipsis in source] elements in the reader that would otherwise be stagnant.”
