Bruce Smith is a tender master of music, and beautiful lines, and complex thoughts, and fascinating wild personal and cultural references.

It's just that very few poets disturb the peace to any degree.

Humor is not funny. Humor is something else. Funny is a joke, sometimes silly. Comedy is deep and connected to tragedy; comedy could be deeper than tragedy, in my view.

If the Buddhist's job is to be detached, I think that the artist's job is to be both detached and attached.

I will look at the footprints going in and out of the water and dream up a small blue good to talk to.

For the Christian mystics, detachment meant to leave attachment so that God could enter you and take over completely and you could climb the ladder to their heaven. Kind of crazy, but what the hell?

It's a kind of liberation to break free in language, if you can break free, but it's also a confinement, because form confines you - whatever the form.