Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

If self is a location, so is love.

Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.

There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.

Walk on air against your better judgement.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...