When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled.

There is so much about the process of writing that is mysterious to me, but this one thing I've found to be true: writing begets writing.

You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others--not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.

The more that accrues, the more depth, weight, and breadth we can bring to the poems, which we then need to throw overboard so we don't sink.

We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded.