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.

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.

I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

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.

Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

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.