Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.

Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.

The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing

I think that poetry is important when you are shipwrecked, when the ordinary structures that hold you up are gone.

Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.