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.

As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.

Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.

All of those on the left, as I am, have always vastly preferred the democratic society over the hierarchical society and still do, but the democratic culture doesn't exist without highly informed citizens capable of thinking well, and if you have schools in which 40 percent of the people coming out of them cannot make change for a dollar, you don't have a democracy. You have a sibling society.

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

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

There are very few adults in our culture able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane - tradition, religion, or devotion.