From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

The act of making poetry is an act of hope.

A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.

The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.

What is love?/ One name for it is knowledge.

You can get there from here, though there's no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been. "Theories of Time and Space

When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

the wages of empire is myopia

University's like this little world, a bubble of time separate from everything before and everything after.

If I could, I would live forever in this moment. But no one can live in a moment, and time moves on.

In short, competition has to shoulder the responsibility of explaining all the meaningless ideas of the economists, whereas it should rather be the economists who explain competition.

Monstrous behavior is the order of the day. I'll tell you when to be shocked. When something human and decent happens!

I'm not afraid to fail...I'm scared to death of dying and having the Lord say to me, 'Angelica, this is what you might have done had you trusted more.

His hands can't hit what his eyes can't see.

American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema.

Meditation isn't to disappear into the light. Meditation is to see all of what we are.

I do believe that what I have called populist democracy is to be preferred to what I have called elitist democracy.

Knowing the edge of your competency is important. If you think you know more than you do, you will get in trouble.