Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.

I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power.

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

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

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