I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving