Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.

The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.

In that way, I don't understand myself. It might have to do with my own conflicts, where to place my body as a child, which I have carried over to now. In this way I'm constantly dislocated.

I don't like crows. In the poem "C," crows are predatory, killing other birds and so forth. But in my morning walks, there were always crows, particularly at certain times of the year. And they're very aggressive, very visible and loud. They're not at all likable, but they have to be dealt with. They are part of the picture, the art in the morning. You cannot deny their reality.

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.

I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.