Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.

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

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

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

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

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.