There's something about soft, unstructured arms that's very beautiful.
I read a lot of graphic novels - some of my favorites graphic novelists or artists are Rebecca Kraatz, Gabrielle Bell, Graham Roumieu, Tom Gauld, and Renee French.
S. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle off my hand until I realized what it was and began to grant it its sovereignty.
Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
When I get interested in a new topic I teach a class on it. There's a graduate seminar I teach in which the students and I try to expand the terminology we use to talk about poetry as well as expand our notion of what makes a poem - we read source texts on architecture, dance, photography, film and the graphic novel.
I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.
Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.
I like drawing. I like to spend the day drawing, the process is important for me. Drawing is a just a pleasure and it's nice to keep it going.
Real prosperity is … Having the financial abundance to obey God's will whenever He wants you to, and however he wants you to.
Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.
Many of our students want to do what they have done and that has made them successful thus far in their lives: play by the rules, and do what is expected. But as much social science research and writing by Malcolm Gladwell, among others, make clear, the rules are mostly created by those already in power so obtaining power often entails standing out and breaking rules and social conventions.