Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind; overflowing with blossomfoam, like a sudsy mug of beer; like a bride ripping off her clothes, dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds, so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene. It’s been doing that all week: making beauty, and throwing it away, and making more.

What we know for sure is that metaphor is the raw uranium of poetry, and that an urge to say that one thing is like something else is one of the earliest markers of the poetic spirit, the nascent poet.

We would give anything for what we have.

So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once.

When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.

No matter how you feel you have to act like you are very popular with yourself; very relaxed and purposeful very unconfused and not like you are walking through the sunshine singing in chains.

And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely