Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

I'm not the only person in the world who is suffering. I'm trying to talk to the world, responding to those voices.

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.

I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that's something someone else has to call you. It's like bragging.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

I think what life experience has brought to my poems is compassion. When you work hard to make a living, raise a child up into the world, fail at marriage and try again, teach and fail, travel and fall, become ill, well again, weak but grateful, you learn patience, forbearance.

If trees could speak they wouldn't