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.

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

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.

Use your special gifts to create work for yourself.

The purpose of relationships is not happiness, but transformation.

I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anachronistic, but I think it's worth preserving.

If you change the rules on what controls you... you will change the rules on what you can control.

Writing is a matter of finding the appropriate balance of dinosaurs and sodomy

I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.

Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.

Politeness costs nothing. Nothing, that is, to him that shows it; but if often costs the world very dear.

Delay not till tomorrow to be wise; tomorrow's sun to thee may neve rise.

Art made by the people for the people, as a joy to the maker and the user.