I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

About loving, I have little to learn from the young.

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

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

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.

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.