One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.

Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.

One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.