A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.

In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.

I once was asked to contribute to a mushroom poem anthology. I didn't have anything, and so instead ended up writing the introduction. I think that request made me more alert to mushrooms, and now they've cropped up in my work, the way mushrooms themselves do after rain, quite a lot. But I've only just now taken up mushroom hunting, after going to a class offered at my local library.

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