The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

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.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.