For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.

The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.