I think we're always most interested in the things we're doing right now.

I think translation is an impossible job, and I admire the people who do it in a way that brings poetry to us that we wouldn't have access to.

Rhythms and sounds are often the first thing I hear and want in a poem, so I can't imagine trying to translate something without at least being able to hear what it sounds like.

It takes courage to get clear about what your vision of the work is and to be persistent about it and pursue it, whatever you're saying. I'm still in a long learning process.

Whether the poet is living or dead, they're part of our imaginative community.

People need what they think of as a poem to be read at their bar mitzvah, their wedding, a funeral, whatever. And people are looking for hope and inspiration. I understand that.

Teaching has given me a community that cares about poetry, and I'm grateful for that.

Keep growing. Stay awake. Beware of gurus. Keep a low overhead.

I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems.

I'm trying to stay open to the idea that the Internet is not the evil foe of publishing but the handmaiden that will turn out to be a blessing for poets and writers.

There are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me.

At a show, I'll look out from the stage and see a woman with a pearl necklace next to a guy in a Grateful Dead T-shirt next to a young kid with his mom. It's fun to see them all together.

No craving void left aching in the soul.

Novalee watched his lips shape the words...the sounds, like whispered secrets, hanging in the air.

Chicago is like a warzone. Chicago is worse than some of the people that you report, in some of the places that you report about every night, in the Middle East.

Prudery is often immodestly modest; its habit is to multiply sentinels in proportion as the fortress is less threatened.

Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites.

I'm so happy. I am able to see the world just by making music, just by doing the thing that I loved doing when I was five years old.

You rose into my life like a promised sunrise, brightening my days with the light in your eyes. I've never been so strong. Now I'm where I belong.

Your own mental attitude is your real boss.

My function at Verve was that of a genuine producer in artists and repertoire.