I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

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