I think that poetry is important when you are shipwrecked, when the ordinary structures that hold you up are gone.

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing

Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.

Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.