Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?

Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.