The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.

Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.

So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain