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.

Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.

Myth and poetry represent a reservoir of vertical thinking, which we could also call longing and gratitude to ancestors. We need that gratitude desperately.

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

The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.

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

I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.