All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.

To eat in the same room where food is cooked - that is the way to thank the Lord for His abundance.

The corncob was the central object of my life. My father was a horse handler, first trotting and pacing horses, then coach horses, then work horses, finally saddle horses. I grew up around, on, and under horses, fed them, shoveled their manure, emptied the mangers of corncobs.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.