And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.

Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

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?

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.