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?

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

Your poems will happen when no one is there.

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.