As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.

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.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.