“I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.”

“Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights mo...”

“I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.”

“The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.”

“I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.”

“From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.”

“In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. ...”

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. ”

“When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been eng...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“Not everyone may not think the way you do.”

“I think you're wrong.""Think what you like.”

“To think, to think, even with a split second left - to think was the only hope.”