“If you look at the poems in Prelude, you can identify the later material by identifying the poems with more white space and unexpected line breaks. Grief did that to me and my writing. It exploded my expectations and introduced these blank pockets of deep feeling. My prose writing became more fluid and lyrical…”

“You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.”

“I am wedded to the notion that Inspiration is the sine que non, the non negotiable prelude to writing a poem.”

“If I wasn't writing poems, I'd be washing my hands all the time.”

“or that writing a poem you can read to no one
is like dancing in the dark.”

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”

“Poem: Lines on the Death of my Husband”

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”

“…whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.”

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”