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.

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.

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.

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

Are you there? If your mind is not there, you are not there! You are wherever your mind is wandering!

Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.

How much of this day have you already forgotten?

America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.

Love, respect, and friendship do unite a people as well as a common hatred does.

I've always been interested in the rest of the world. My family is very eccentric; my parents have always been very supportive of travel and doing whatever I thought I needed to do.

We must remember that one of the most insidious ways of keeping women and minorities powerless is to let them only talk about harmless and inconsequential subjects.

Culture Clash is a national treasure.

We're all looking for the highest, fullest expression of ourselves as a human being.

Teaching has never been far from my life. It's the most natural thing I do. Apparently, as I said, I cannot not do it.