You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good..

If trees could speak they wouldn't.

I don’t worry anymore about writing. There are times that I go through dry periods. I never go through a block. I’m always writing, but there are tim….

I write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear myself breathing. I w….

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question..

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's..

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it..

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world..

We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded..

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us..

Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for anoth….

Joseph [Millar] is much more disciplined than I am. He's up every morning meditating, then he writes, and he reads throughout the day. He probably re….

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the ….

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t..

Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence….

You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake..

When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled..

If you want to be a writer in the world you really have to sit down and say, 'Why do I want to do this and why was I drawn to it to begin with?' And ….

I'm not the only person in the world who is suffering. I'm trying to talk to the world, responding to those voices..

I have always loved too much, or not enough..

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, y….