To be a poet, to my mind, is to be aware, as I once read in a children’s book about the five senses: to ‘see all there is to see, hear all there is to hear, smell all there is to smell, taste all there is to taste, touch all there is to touch.’ To pay attention; to be curious and alert; to be receptive and reflective, reverent and irreverent, romantic and skeptical; to mourn and to praise; to contemplate, celebrate, and salvage what we can of the universe, on behalf of our species. To be a poet, then, is no more or less than to be fully human and to translate and distill that experience into language so meticulously as to evoke and redeem something of life itself.

—from “The Edge: Of Motherhood and Poetics,” Homing In: Attempts on a Life of Poetry and Purpose