One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'

The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.

Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'

To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.

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

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.