I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.