The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

The way things work / is that eventually / something catches.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’

There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—

Water is a miracle - it takes so many forms - is the core of life - is holy. So it becomes important to pay utmost attention to the holiness which is this planet's life - blood, which we are destroying. I always look for it in a poem. I honor it. I pay it mind.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.