If self is a location, so is love.

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.