Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.

Laughing at ones own attempt at humor while saying things just come to me should be punishable by death.

The legal profession is a business with a tremendous collection of egos. Few people who are not strong egotistically gravitate to it.

As you do your daily meditations, your life will change. Most people change between the ages of zero to four. The older we get the less we change. When we meditate we become perpetually young.

Investors believe in the best possible outcome.

Remember where you have been and know where you are going. Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way.

I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.

But who, if he be called upon to face Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined Great issues, good or bad for humankind, Is happy as a lover.