My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.

The woman hanging from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago is not alone...She is all the women of the apartment building who stand watching her, watching themselves.

True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others.

If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.

I believe that poets have to be inside their poems somewhere, or the poem won't work.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

The saxophone is so human. Its tendency is to be rowdy, edgy, talk too loud, bump into people, say the wrong words at the wrong time, but then, you take a breath all the way from the center of the earth and blow. All that heartache is forgiven. All that love we humans carry makes a sweet, deep sound and we fly a little.