I wrote poetry for seven or eight years, maybe longer, before I could say I was a poet. If people asked, I'd say I wrote poetry; I wouldn't go further. I was in my mid- to late-thirties before I felt that I was a poet, which I think meant that I had begun to embody my poems in some way. I wasn't just a writer of them. Hard to say what, as a poet, my place in the world is. Some place probably between recognition and neglect.

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

I don't let a poem go into the world unless I feel that I've transformed the experience in some way. Even poems I've written in the past that appear very personal often are fictions of the personal, which nevertheless reveal concerns of mine. I've always thought of my first-person speaker as an amalgam of selves, maybe of other people's experiences as well.

I love what's left after love has been tested.

A true inner world is often revealed by style and sensibility as much as by what appears to be confession.

A moment of something between acceptance and resignation of one's smallness in the world.