gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

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.

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.

Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.

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?