The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete hu….

Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often los….

Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks!.

Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush, scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly to find an unexpected waterfall, not half a mile from the ne….

In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literatu….

It seems to me that awakening to the full potential of what your life might be - beyond the possibilities of your own family, your own class, your ow….

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, ho….

Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reade….

Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world..

There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emoti….

Teach us the names of what we have destroyed..

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens..

We lived in places that we never knew. We could not name the birds perched on our sill, Or see the trees we cut down for our view. What we possessed ….

My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death mus….

Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening..

To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity..

Being so deeply rooted in one place and culture allows a genuine writer to experiment wildly with the material without ever losing touch with its ess….

Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost….

Current Catholic worship often ignores the essential connection between truth and beauty, body and soul, at the center of the Catholic worldview. The….

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it….

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought..