“You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.”

“I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.”

“...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.”

“Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.”

“TransformationsAll night he ran, his body air, But that was in another year. Lately the answered shape of his laughter, The shape of his smallest word, is fire. He who is a fierce young crier Of poems will be as tranquil as water, Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure Image of limitless desire; Then enter earth and come to be, Inch by inch, geography.”

“I refuse to turn to theology to justify the life or redeem it. There is a question always of the connection to the eternal. I say to myself above all, keep alive your conviction that there are sacred elements in the life in the practice of the life that must be respected. But the conviction in the existence of the sacred does not necessarily imply that you need to believe in a creator, because we are the ones that made the sacred.”

“Miss Murphy in first gradewrote its name in chalkacross the board and told usit was roaring down the storm tracksof the milky way at frightful speedand if it wandered off its courseand smashed into the earththere'd be no school tomorrow.”