I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.

How shall the heart be reconciled / To its feast of losses?

Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't making enough of an effort to reconcile the contradictions of life. All you get is sweet monotonous flow. Writer's block is nothing to commit suicide over. It simply indicates some imbalance between your experience and your art, and I think that's constructive.

Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.

I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.

Forward my mail to Mars.