I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

It's an attitude of superiority. We are superior to the rest of life. The Book of Genesis says: 'Increase and multiply and have dominion over the birds of the air and the animals and so forth.' You run it; it's yours; do what you like with it. I don't know how old that text is, but it represents an attitude that probably really got going with the beginning of agriculture. Before that, the hunter-gatherers were gentler people than the agriculture.

I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here

From what we cannot hold the stars are made.

Your absence has gone through me

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