Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said..

So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance..

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into….

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of respons….

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the….

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar..

Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to th….

Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind..

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will….

Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am..

At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, t….

How fragile we are, between the few good moments..

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can..

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge..

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being..

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen..

Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one st….

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-….

Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention..

Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again..

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, sinc….