Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

Very few people really see things unless they've had someone in early life who made them look at things. And name them too. But the looking is primary, the focus.

It is fatal to one's artistic life to talk about something that is in process.

We must breathe time as fishes breathe water.

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.