“Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.”

The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.

I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years.

One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility.

I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.

You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.

It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.

It’s financial of course, but it’s also the lifestyle choices. The more money people have the further away from each other they often want to be.

It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I’m terrible at writing overtly political poems.

I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable.

I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.

Bones was a grouch but he was sympathetic. The show worked like a boy band in that way… it had characters who embodied different psychic or emotional positions and that allowed me to see a great range of things

That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.

I had to find a way to be more honest about what happened. And it wasn’t fun to write, even though the poems aren’t 100% autobiographical.

They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.

By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.

I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing.

It [is] very unfair to influence a child’s mind by inculcating any opinions before it [has] come to years of discretion to choose for itself.

The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care?

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner.

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.

From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

The phrase ‘off with the crack of the bat’, while romantic, is really meaningless, since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.

When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.

Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.