The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.

I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.

The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry.

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning

The moment we turn over the soil we start poisoning it and we go on poisoning it all the way through... and there's probably not a river in the United States that doesn't have pesticide poisoning in it. The fish are dying. The seas are getting polluted. All of these things are happening. The rain forests are going. That's what the context is.