Occupation: Poet Birth: 1946
Earth's immune system - its rapid response team of self-protection - becomes invigorated at times of peril. And one sees it at play now in the upwell….
There are landscapes and species that are not going to be here a hundred years from now, fifty years from now. One gift we as writers give to the wor….
The world is going to be less biologically rich for quite some time in the future. We are always weeping that we live in such a diminished world, but….
The environment is becoming so much a central concern, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that w….
If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It's almost a religious experience. I feel that I could ne….
A lot of times students will come up to me and say, "Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such." And I say, "That's w….
We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature..
We're facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to th….
I'm always trying to ask myself both "Who am I as an individual?" and "What are the cultural forces that have made me the person that I am?" How can ….
I'm extremely interested in science as the mythos within which I live. Science tells me what kind of animal I am, what kind of a universe I live in. ….
As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward ….
Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is the poor citizens….
I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of t….
Writers want recognition, audience, some corroboration that all those hours at the desk and in daydreams add up to something in the esteem of others..
I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along..
I don't know much about death and the sorriest lesson I've learned is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos, offer small comfort in the….
I had wanted for so many years to feel that writing really was at the center of my life, not something I did in my spare time. So the writing and tea….
You see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that….
For the poets, my hope is that they will, quite simply, feel the obligation to be really informed about the situation in which we find ourselves, in ….
There is a difference between our wisdom and nature's simplicity. That reflects the burden of a complex intelligence. A complex intelligence like our….
It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with ….