Moon In the WindowI wish I could say I was the kind of childwho watched the moon from her window,would turn toward it and wonder.I never wondered. I read. Dark signsthat crawled toward the edge...

How many losses does it take to stop a heart,to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?

Death comes to me again, a girlin a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.It’s not so terrible she tells me,not like you think, all darknessand silence. There are windchimesand the smell of lemons, some daysit rains, but...

You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn’t depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you’re any good.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s.

The slate black sky. The middle stepof the back porch. And long agomy mother’s necklace, the beadsrolling north and south. Brokenthe rose stem, water into drops, glassknob on the bedroom door. Last summer’spot of parsley...

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn’t identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you’re the one that bleeds.

We aren’t suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think...

Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won’t magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as...

Poetry is an intimate act. It’s about bringing forth something that’s inside you–whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the...

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

Maybe it’s what we don’t say/that saves us.