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

It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over.

Come with me into the woods where spring is advancing, as it does, no matter what, not being singular or particular, but one of the forever gifts, and certainly visible.

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving

I know many lives worth living.

Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.

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.