The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.

And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."

I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.

A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.