There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

If self is a location, so is love.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.