If you are my friend and say to me, "Please don't write about this," I won't.

My advice to my younger self would have been, "Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out."

I don't know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems.

Unlike Woody Allen, I would be happy to be part of any (poetry) club that would have me.

Over the years, I became more and more interested in the forms and techniques in which things could be said.

After my marriage ended, I had an urge to skip that part of my life completely in terms of poetry, not publish anything at all about it.

Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.

I love going to movie theaters, even in the era of movies on-demand and Netflix. When you are in a movie theater, no one can reach you by phone or other means.

The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure.

Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College - and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one's life as a poet.

I had no idea, when I was writing early on, that my poems would be published or read by anyone, never mind people I knew or would meet. I just wrote urgently - naïvely, I suppose, looking back.

You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

Black is bountiful. White is witful. Both are beautiful.

Elton John's opinion turned the label's opinion around, all in a day.

I never was a crazy liquor drinker, and I don't like beer that much - though I keep the brews at home because my homies love beer.

Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.

Private enterprise in cricket might not be regarded as the last word, and ultimate state direction would not do it any harm.

Country's hip; it's cool music.

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.

He had come to believe that life was a series of ironic ambushes. - Doctor Sleep

The ocean, after all, is not about stability but about change. Change is normal. Everything changes. All the time.