I have a great relationship with animals, and with children. I get to their level. I try to see the way a child looks at the world, it's hugely different.

It's hard to say what drives a three year-old, but I think I had a sense that nature was my solace, and nature was a place in which there was beauty, in which there was order.

Statistically it's a certainty there are hugely advanced civilizations, intelligences, life forms out there. I believe they're so advanced they're even doing interstellar travel. I believe it's possible they even came here.

That I learned even as a three year-old that I see this world that is really a mess and I learned to say, this is not me. I am not the one that is messed up. It is out there.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense; it has particular ways of catching an environment.

Whitman expressed the whole universe in his poetry and in his catalogues. That attitude almost defines what we call American romanticism, or American transcendentalism. I feel particularly close to them, because I am now out in the universe. I’m in a position to see nature from another point of view, to be outside the earth and see the big picture.