What's a word, a talisman, to hold against the world?

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

What writing does is to reveal.

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.