For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.

To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.

To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.

In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it's the quality of experience. It's being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.