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

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

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.

When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.

Your poems will happen when no one is there.