I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Once that first line succeeds in selling me on the worthiness of some totality that in no way, at that point, actually exists, I can continue.

I think “I’m in the reservation of my mind” has an incredibly destructive connotation for me now. It’s apocalyptic, when I think about it. The human journey has always been about movement. And a century ago, when we moved onto the reservation, my tribe stopped moving. All the innovation we’ve done since then has been just modeling after Europeans.

For those of us of African descent, the reconstruction never ended.

Healing is relational. We like to think that one can heal oneself just by force of will, but my experience certainly aligns with the argument the passage makes: We need other people.

I believe that: A book is going to have a voice and I have to find it.

what a monumental work of art does: takes the pieces of you, reassembles them, and hands them back to you in all the right order.

Years ago, I wrote an article called “Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader” in which I enumerated five or six of the principle pleasures of poetry. One of the final pleasures, for instance, is the pleasure of meaning—the moment when a poem’s emotional effect begins to crystallize into significance you can articulate. But the very final

Writing free verse, it’s hard to know exactly when a line has the feel or rhythm that you want. It’s hard to describe, though you know it when you feel it. For me, it’s often about gracefulness. I want graceful lines and graceful sentences. I try to write very simply. The vocabulary is simple, the sentences tend to be quite conventional—subject,