When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.

"And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

I don't have a cell phone (though for years I've kept saying, "soon").

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving