Because I've been doing my practice for so long, I knew what to do even under really hard circumstances.

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

To stay close and intimate with experience is to stay close to the mind; the nitty gritty mind of the way things really are.

Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go. And don't worry too much about security. You will eventually have a deep security when you begin to do what you want.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.