Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.

I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this, they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since, the answering yes.

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.