Teaching has given me a community that cares about poetry, and I'm grateful for that.

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.

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.

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.

Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice.

You are eternal, beautiful, and real.

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Take time to thank everyone who has helped you along the way.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

A letter, timely writ, is a rivet to the chain of affection; And a letter, untimely delayed, is as rust to the solder.

Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality.

To the soldier, luck is merely another word for skill.

Life is so groovy when your record is hot.

If you have to learn it from a self-help book, you may be beyond help.