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

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

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

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.

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.