I've Kept Journals At Many Times In

Poetry Is The Inner Life Of A Culture, Its Nervous System, Its Deepest Way Of Imagining The World. A Culture That Ignores Its Poets, Chokes Off Its Nervous System And Becomes Mortally Ill.

People Are Terrified. A Lot Of Them Are In Relationships That Aren't Satisfying, And If You Tell Them They Can Change Their Life, They Get Really Scared.

A Baby's A Full Time Job For Three Adults. Nobody Tells You That When You're Pregnant, Or You'd Probably Jump Off A Bridge. Nobody Tells You How All-consuming It Is To Be A Mother-how Reading Goes Out The Window And Thinking Too.

I Myself Hate That Old Hemingwayesque Paradigm Of The Writer As Prizefighter And I Have Tried Hard To Create An Alternate One For Myself. When Anne Sexton Admonished Me, "we Are All Writing God's Poem," I Took It To Mean There Should Be No Competition Between Writers Because We Are All Involved In A Common Project, A Common Prayer. But To Gore's And Norman's Generation, Particularly Those Male Writers Who Served In The Second World War, The Prizefighter Paradigm Remains.

Biography Is Essentially A Collaborative Art, The Latest Biographer Collaborating With All Those Who Wrote Earlier.