Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.

Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.

If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.

Acclaim is a distraction.

I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.

We are all participants in the marvelous.