We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere; there are many surprises yet to come.
The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever from, One or Two Things.
I know many lives worth living.
A poet’s interest in craft never fades, of course.
We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story...
Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.
When it’s over I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real...
Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don’t want fancy work.
Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.
The world is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery.
I got saved by poetry and I got saved by the beauty of the world.
I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars.
Invention hovers always a little above the rules.
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
The sea isn’t a place but a fact, and a mystery...
For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.
If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.
Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone. When I’m alone I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.