There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.