“We have to explain ourselves to people all the time. We have to say, “Yes, I am a unicorn, believe in me.””

It’s not that I want to be, but it’s a fascination of the mind and it plays a role in why I want to live my life a certain way.

One of the reasons I’ve felt so connected to poetry throughout the years is because it’s the only art form that has breath built into it. And I need that breath now. I need that breath so much. So, yes, it is a refuge for me. Absolutely.

I’m always telling my students that the weirdest thing is the truth. I mean, the fact that we get up in the morning and put on clothes is weird.

I have been writing. Even when I intend not to write, I find myself writing. I’m currently in a place where I should be putting together the fifth book, but then more poems are coming. It’s exciting and somewhat daunting.

All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles and ghosts of men, and spirits behind those birds of flame. I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,

Moving away from “useful” doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. You can still need poetry while also needing money or food or physical health.

The more I am aware of my mortality the better person I am and the better I am at choosing a life that is aware of its beauty.

I kind of hate it.” Or, “Oh you wait tables? I didn’t know that was something people did.” I say it can be invigorating because, on some level, we have to evaluate what we do and why we do it almost daily.

You know how we are when a new book of poems is at last coming together – all frenzy, distraction, and bounty? It’s as if I’ve turned into summer itself.

Precise, graceful, and generous, the poems in SuperLoop, seem to be born out of a deep, careful attention and a profound compassion.

The longed-for return of the bees. Unaffected and inherently hopeful, Callihan’s work is as merciful as it is moving.

Poems have always been a place for questions for me. Not answers. And I have a lot of questions these days.

Language can also be play and music and beauty and desire and grief and rage and truth without always having to be message-driven or purely functional.

There’s so much rage in the world now and I’m finding poems to be the place where I want to stay. I rage and rage and then write a poem and return to breathing.

I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

Sometimes the quiet observer, sometimes the kid in the center of the messed-up carnival, these poems are the fireflies you’ve missed all winter

The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity.

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history.

Via the squares on the chessboard, the Indians explain the movement of time and the age.

There’s no need to explain anything at length. Let go of love and hate and let things be. That’s all that I do in my own practice.

It’s easy to explain the psychological state of a character at a particular moment, but it’s very difficult to describe it through the delicate nuances of action and dialogue. Yet it is not impossible.

When we cannot look around and explain anything we are the quantum world.

We need to develop meditation so that the understanding arises clearly within oneself. It is not the case that merely by listening to another’s explanation our defilements will disappear.

He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.