Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.

The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

It turned out to be impossible for me to 'run away' in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.

I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.

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.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.