What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

You cannot play for safety and make art.

Tell the truth... maybe just to see clearly, as clearly as possible.

I don't go get a poem. It calls me and I accept it.

I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.

Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense

they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine