I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.

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

The act of making poetry is an act of hope.

A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.

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

What is love?/ One name for it is knowledge.

You can get there from here, though there's no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been. "Theories of Time and Space

When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

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.

the wages of empire is myopia

The name of a great writer is usually bigger than the title of his book. Both literally and figuratively.

I envied Lesley her unshakable optimism. She always looked on the bright side of things. If they Had a bright side.

Fear to do base, unworthy things is valor; if they be one to us, to suffer them is valor too.

I was painfully shy when I was younger but at some point you've gotta grow up. I think the genius in the man-boy thing is you tap into a woman's motherly instincts.

I used to be a print reporter.

Forests were the first temples of the Divinity, and it is in the forests that men have grasped the first idea of architecture.

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return - sending back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.

The simpler the insight, the more profound the conclusion.

Whatever moisture is left in the popcorn when it gets from harvest to bag to your popper is what's going to determine how well the corn pops.

We're all assigned a piece of the garden, a corner of the universe that is ours to transform.