Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

Cherish your wilderness.

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place - in this culture - to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best.

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.

... people get confidential at midnight.

When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old