Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.

Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.

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

Everyone is so different. I sometimes wish I wrote in a different way. You know, that feeling of: So-and-so writes slowly, if only I wrote slowly.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

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

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