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

I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live -- to grow, to bear fruit.

A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.

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.

We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.

...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.