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

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

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

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.

I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.

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

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