I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry. ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.

Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

I've always thought of myself as a reporter.