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

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland.

The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be "Yes." The next words: "And then."

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.