Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course.
I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.
In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis.
For better or worse, poetry is my life.
It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed.
Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer's. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons.
New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.
When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date.
Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry.
In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia.
I write longhand; I make changes longhand, and I have an assistant who types it up. She lives 70 yards away. Every afternoon, I have a case I leave out on the porch, and she brings it back the next morning.
I live in the house my great-grandfather moved to in 1865... I spent all my summers here as a kid haying with my grandfather, and it was my favorite place in the world.
There are books all around me... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.
I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.
Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
I don't have a computer. I never have had one.
I've had someone, my assistant, type for me. I've done it that way for more than 50 years because I type with one finger, although quite rapidly.
