"I have been influenced by the Bible, Bach's music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins."

“Music should be directed by the ear, poetry by the imagination”

“Poetry is: a classifying, a botanizing, a voracity of contemplation, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation in which the actual is a deft benficence.”

“I don't consider In Distrust of Merits a poem. It's just a burst of feelings. It's emotion recorded, a 'haphazard form ' a protest.”

“Modern American Poetry: Marianne Moore”

“For me, a poem starts when a felicitious phrase springs to mind.”

“Yes, I believe in prayer, as a mystery which can endow one with more power perhaps than any other spiritual mystery, yet a mystery that cannot be exposited to a point where it is not a mystery.”