To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.

It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

When an elder turns to face the dead, that means he turns away from facing the future and his own retirement in Phoenix, let's say. He turns and finds himself facing the children.

I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.