A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.

The sea is as near as we come to another world.

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.

There comes a time when you have to trust your own judgment, when you must close your eyes and let your instinct rule you.

I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.