I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.

I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on.

Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.