Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.

All good poems are victories over something.

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

When I stop becoming, that's when I worry.

I’ve had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches. A heart is to be spent.

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.