"You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship."

"Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative."

"Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged."

"I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it."

"Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are."

"Life is an incurable disease."

"Wisdom principle 58 tells us that the journey of life is lesson 75."

"Wisdom principle 92 tells us that the journey of life is lesson 60."