You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.

In the dream life you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.

I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write.

I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives.

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.