Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.

Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

It is no use thinking that writing of poems - the actual writing - can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

I saw that worrying had come to nothing and gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.

I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.

Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.