"I'd rather write about polar bears than people." — Mary Oliver

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 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.

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.