With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them.

I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

Every breath is a resurrection.

That's crudely put, but If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.

Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest.

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

When it's right you can't say Who is kissing whom.

To guide someone through the halls of hell is not the same as love.

Maybe she loved me, maybe not –who knows?Not even the godscan see intoa human heart –it’s that dark.

The weatherman is not only blamed for his failure to foretell, he is blamed for the weather itself.

The standard of success in life isn't the things. It isn't the money or the stuff. It is absolutely the amount of joy that you feel.

We must have recourse to the rules of music when our genius and our ear seem to deny what we are seeking.

It isn't a matter of hope. It's a matter of - between the options of trying nothing and trying something, let's try something but let's also be very thoughtful about what that something is.

If commodity prices are no longer going up then food prices in the grocery store will no longer go up, at some point.

The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.

Study is the scourge of boyhood, the environment of youth, the indulgence of adults and the curative for the aged.

I was well known to African Americans before Bill Clinton discovered me. He was like Christopher Columbus riding up on something he didn't understand.

Unfortunately we just toured the East and West coasts so we didn't run into any rednecks.

In general, anyone who paid the long distance telephone tax will get the refund on their 2006 federal income tax return. This includes individuals, businesses and non-profit organizations.