Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.

When allowed to return to the class, your feelings of humility and lonesomeness will render you a much finer student and person.

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Being alive is a common road. It's what we notice makes us different.

why are we so monumentally slow?

I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!