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The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

I am a firm believer that one way to become enlightened is to be so relaxed, as relaxed as you possibly can be.

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.