The first lesson I've learned is that no matter what you do in your life you have to figure out your own internal rhythms - I mean what works for you doesn't necessarily work for your friend.

On the mountains mistakes are fatal. In politics mistakes are wounding emotionally but you recover. Personally wilderness helps me get back in touch with natural rhythms helps me reflect and in the process restore my creativity.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

I used to write sonnets and various things and moved from there into writing prose which incidentally is a lot more interesting than poetry including the rhythms of prose.

From my music training I knew that some Spanish rhythms apart 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Living here on Earth we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos poetry is born.

Music rhythms are mathematical patterns. When you hear a song and your body starts moving with it your body is doing math. The kids in their parents' garage practicing to be a band may not realize it but they're also practicing math.

When people in stadiums do the Wave it's the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion pass time and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the stars.