If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't….

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us insi….

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it coul….

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page..

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own..

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of ….

There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them..

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you….

Let me peer out at the world through your lens. (Maybe I'll shudder, or gasp, or tilt my head in a question.) Let me see how your blue is my turquois….

The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascina….

If someday, in a morning, you see you, in a mirror or the dent of a spoon, and wonder Where is my soul and Where has it gone, remember this: Catch th….

Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don't reject them, let them come through when they're….

I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when ….

... the real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle..

Sometimes there’s no one to listen to what you really might like to say at a certain moment. The paper always listens..

Being alive is a common road. It's what we notice makes us different..

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the expe….

Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy..

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing..

Where we live in the world is never one place. Our hearts, those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us moons before we are ready for them..

I am looking for the human who admits his flaws Who shocks the adversary By being kinder not stronger What would that be like? We don't even know.