When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.

I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

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.

Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.

There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.