Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

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

Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about?

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.