I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.