Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

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.

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.

Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

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.