I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

Some people say Earth is the bottom level of Purgatory.' She pointed toward the floor and frowned.'I call it the top floor of Hell.

I'm one of those people who really wants to do everything. And if I had enough time, I really would.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?

When you realize you're alive, you can live life!

I have a tendency to be awfully big-hearted and it's very hard for me to say no, even when I need to.

I have the best divorce of anyone I've heard of.

America is not a special country by accident. It did not happen on its own. It happened because for over 200 years, each generation before us did what needed to be done.

In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.

I will never give up politics. I've tried to give it up three times, but I never made it. Politics mobilizes me. I won't last long if I give it up.

Intelligence is that aspect of human cognition that we haven't managed to emulate yet.