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.

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.

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

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.

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling.