There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

The beautiful world is just one thought away. It's already there just waiting for us to realize and to accept it.

Our head is designed to broaden our capability of analyzing facts, events and draw the right conclusions

Of all the ways people save time, I think racism is the worst.

Find a great mentor who believes in you, your life will change forever!

Some say that the universe is made so that when we are about to understand it it changes into something even more incomprehensible. And then there are those who say that this has already happened.

My esteem in this country has gone up substantially. It is very nice now when people wave at me, they use all their fingers.

Time is the school in which we learn.

When Jesus died on the cross, so did your sin; when He rose from the dead, so did your HOPE.

Uncorrupted man, with God's blessing, advances across the fields of the universe as though he were walking down a country lane.

It's funny how intimate it feels to get a text.