The one concession I've made as I've gotten older is that my children are now adults and they're in their twenties and thirties and so I'm careful ab…

- Mary Jo Salter

Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff's in my coffee. / You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.

- Mary Jo Salter

Money is that dear thing which, if you're not careful, you can squander your whole life thinking of.

- Mary Jo Salter

Political poetry is the hardest thing to write because you cannot preach to the converted, and if you're only seeking to convert, then write an edito…

- Mary Jo Salter

Part of what the imagination does later in life is it's linking you not just to who you are now but to all the people you've been.

- Mary Jo Salter

As poets, we're writing into the void, and we're not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conv…

- Mary Jo Salter

And I said to myself, here's the problem with the world: The Italians are too Italian, and nobody else is Italian enough.

- Mary Jo Salter

All writers know in advance that they are not going be able to reproduce in its wonderful fullness the thing that's in their heads; we're going to ge…

- Mary Jo Salter

I am a relatively rational being and I like to create order in poems. I like meter, I like rhyme, but ultimately I don't know where the poems come fr…

- Mary Jo Salter