My books have come many years apart and each one seems to reflect a period of experience. Ending the book is like putting a period on a certain movement. Interior and external - both.

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.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so.

You might be a redneck if your biggest ambition in life is to git that big ole coon. The one what hangs 'round over yonder, back'ah Bubba's barn.

I think one of the things I was most interested in finding out was how differently we approached our work. And my reality was that we didn't approach it very differently at all, which was funny.

Senator Jeff Sessions is reportedly on the [Donald] Trump shortlist to be either the next Secretary of Defense or the next Attorney General of the United States.

Of every four words I write, I strike out three.

In a successful picture book, you always want the voice of the text to match the voice of the art; so that it seems as if the same person writing is the one illustrating and vice versa.

I'm not a preacher, but I preach. I'm not a Buddhist, but I chant. I'm not race theorist, but I have questions and ponderances around the complexities of race and class and culture wherever I am.

Because I was a woman, I was vulnerable. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman.'

Vile worm, thou wast o'erlook'd even in thy birth.