If I call it pain, and try to touch it With my hands, my own life, It lies still and the music thins, A pulse felt for through garments.

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.

Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.

time never stops, but does it end? and how many livesbefore take-off, before we find ourselves beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

Everything that disappears/Disappears as if returning somewhere

History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice.

When I was young, my father was lord Of a small kingdom: a wife, a garden, Kids for whom his word was Word. It took years for my view to harden, To shrink him to human size.

I've been beating my head all day long on the same six lines.

I grew up in northern California in a town called Fairfield, which is kind of exactly between San Francisco and Sacramento, a small suburb. And I'm the youngest of five children.

A negative past is only there to motivate you to start creating a future that's far better than it.

I got to know Sugar Ray but I certainly would not say we were good friends.

The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and 'consciousness' cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and 'will' cannot evolve involuntarily.

Parenthood has been the beneficiary of wonderful performances by child actors.

So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.

I am full of gratitude for my life - and for this house.

I love Abby Lee Miller. Honestly, if there's such a thing as past lives, I was definitely a dancer.

I can't get my wife to agree with me on everything or my kids to agree with everything.

we are drawn to each other like drops of water, like the planets we repulse each other like magnets, like the color of our skin.

The poor taxpayer may wipe his shoes on a $3 doormat when he goes home, but not the Navy. It is, damn the cost, full feet ahead on a doormat you would be ashamed to get muddy.