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….

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music..

I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their p….

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appea….

Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpac….

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade ….

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the ….

It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at….

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing..

The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness..

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity..

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us..

Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actua….

And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of th….

Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind..

Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It sa….

I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust t….

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond..

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color ….