As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it..

Life is short. But desire, desire is long..

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music..

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise..

I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their p….

How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own..

I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch….

Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life..

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appea….

In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of th….

I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves..

A poem can use anything to talk about anything..

Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime..

A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook..

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving.

Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled..

Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpac….

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn..

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade ….

The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small….

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the ….