If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.
— Mary Oliver
Poetry is meant to be heard.
I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day - which is what I did.
I like books that are fat and full.
I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
I'd rather write about polar bears than people.
Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
Apparently, I've been considered a recluse.
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.
To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.
I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.
I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.
I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.
Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.
The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails.
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.
I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life.
I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.
Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along.
At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.
I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.
I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.
I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.
Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
