I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

I got saved by poetry. And I got saved by the beauty of the world.