I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.

When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.