The new year always brings us what we want Simply by bringing us along—to see A calendar with every day uncrossed, A field of snow without a single f….

Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones..

What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead..

And hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion. the only other living thing a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended in the blindin….

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

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

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….

Teach us the names of what we have destroyed..

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….

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

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….

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….

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

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

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….

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

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….

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….

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

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

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