If I know when you’ve been naughty or nice, does that make me Santa Claus or God. I can’t remember.

Twitter’s “Who to Follow” suggestions should be renamed “Who to Avoid.”

I want to be open to wide views and visionary dimensions that can be fantastic, but not deformed.

To my credit, at every phase of my life, I have surrounded myself with those who are more talented than I am.

I am staring out the window, waiting for my husband to come home and walk me.

People say I’m just like my father: a pistol. Too bad I’m not loaded.

I have a passion that is greater than you.

When one cannot issue orders, one becomes adept at offering suggestions.

Because I could not disagree, I remained silent. This was the first step in the occupation of my life.

I remember touching David Lynch: His skin was soft and cold, like a Vietnamese spring roll.

It is from word groupings that don’t make immediate sense that a kind of sense arises, in part created by the reader. The beauty of this kind of sense is that it shifts, depending on the reader and the given reading by any one reader. What was on one reading might not be on the next.

When people ask me where my family is from, I should say, They are from the soil, and they have returned to the soil.

Poems will trap you if you don’t trap them first.

Creating a network of writers is easy; creating a network of readers is another matter entirely.

“There is no answer to ‘Who am I?’ because nobody exists independently, but rather each of us exists only through everyone else. And who can understand everyone else?” — modification of a Shunryu Suzuki-roshion quote

Dana Guthrie Martin: A self-taught being of the human variety who enhances her existence with various starting points and no end points.

Do you know what it means to unironize the word faith?

Sure, I’ll pray to the sunset. What harm could that do?

This sky is making me sad and beautiful.

How much of what we think and feel collectively dies with us individually?

My roller derby name: Sylvia’s Wrath.

Misread of the day: “I care for impotent waiters.”

My summary of status messages I’ve read this morning: I [insert verb] [insert direct object].

Once you realize your brilliance is a constant, the need to rush things will dissipate.

I wonder sometimes if rolling a radio onto a stage is better than writing the word “radio” on a page.

I have nothing to say about the radio that you can’t learn from a radio.

I would be a little nervous if people agreed with me.

My new boots are chick magnets.

Every time we write, it’s like a little bit of culture is extracted from the whole to stand on its own and say, Look at we think. Look at how we feel.

I aspire to virtual locality.

I’m not sure why poems need to make things clear. Why can’t poems make things muddy? Disorient as opposed to orient?

When the poem becomes strange, you know you might have something.

I feel like the read-write culture is going back to being the read-only culture because we figured out the read-write culture is just too much work—on everyone’s end.

I think clogs make my butt look smaller.

Poetry should aspire to be better than its authors.

Social media and digital communications allow us to communicate what we feel independent of feeling what we feel. Typing an emoticon smiley face might be an indicator or placeholder for a feeling that would lead us to smile, but it is often devoid of the actual feeling—a stand-in that serves only to fill space on the screen and to express to someone else an emotion that never took up residence in our bodies.

I would say I have been to hell and back over the past 6 years, but I am not quite sure yet about the “and back” part.

To open up the earth with a crowbar. To scale trees for their sacred fruits. To whisper “thank you, thank you” only to hear no “you are welcome.” To drive elbow deep into whatever we think is ours.

To enter another day of “I” infesting our thoughts. To discern space with a dollar. To apologize, then do more wrong.

Today I measured time by switchbacks, not by minutes.

The impulse to create is merely the impulse to live—not the impulse to live well.

What have you accomplished today? What have you accompliced today?

Sometimes people make so many requests of us that we no longer feel like human beings but instead like walking task lists.

Looking for the topic sentence in this essay is like looking for an Easter egg on Halloween.

My process for writing is to write things down.

My defense: They were 50 percent off, so I got 4,700 percent more than I needed.

Sometimes when you see something a certain way, someone will come along and tell you your perceptions are wrong. Please remember you are under no obligation to alter your perceptions on this basis of another’s.

If as Foucault states the soul is a product of culture, that explains why we re-create the culture we know in those potentially revolutionary moments where we are able to remove ourselves from what “is.” Rather than creating something new, we revert to the culture we know not out of habit or because we can’t conceive of something else but because we must re-create what “was”—and in doing so re-create our souls. We are bringing our souls back into being, from the nothingness that threatens to consume them.

If the poem is going to have a chance, we must energize the paper.

I want to unfold everything and see what it—all of it—looks like flat.

Last night I dreamed the librarians held hands and danced in circles and told me to put more grit in my poems.

When I get angsty, information gathering calms me down. As does putting cotton swabs in my ears.

I like certain things better than other things, and by things I mean people.

The public diction I once used seems foreign to me now, as if it is the imprint for a happiness I will never mold myself to again.

Attack my character and integrity once: Shame on you. Attack my character and integrity twice: Shame on me for allowing you do it again.

Character and integrity don’t really belong to me at all. Both are communally constructed, as are self and identity.

It’s interesting how the language of torture works its way into poetry, into everything.

There’s something vulgar about a sandwich whose bread is missing.

I am much more interested in studying people’s behaviors than being on the receiving end of those behaviors.

I fell down today and hurt myself. The fall was complicated and graceless.

We share nothing but our humanity. And sometimes we share our lunch.

My implosion is my confession.

Sometimes the slow dance of poetry needs to pick up its tempo—or change tunes entirely.

Who says poetry is the best way to communicate? It is probably the worst way. Depending on how you define “poetry.” And “worst.” And “is.”

When we say, “There you have it,” we rarely know where “there” is or what “it” is.

I’m waiting for the day I fall on my face—then I’ll have an excuse for getting a nose job.

I’ve reached the existential moment where the question “How can I do the most good?” has been replaced by “How can I do the least harm?”

I looked at my poetry today and felt lonely, alone. Then I thought, “Yes, this is how it’s supposed to feel.”

If public libraries want to be relevant, they need to identify and address issues relevant to their communities, not hide from those issues.

I like books because they age with me.

I am more interested in curating content than creating it.

My preoccupations betray my privilege.

Clever is the new dull.

My not watching TV has its advantages: It keeps nonsense framed as just that, instead of giving it a sense of meaning.

Geeky T-shirt I want to have made: “Don’t blame me. Blame my social network.”

As soon as I see an ampersand in a poem, I stop reading.

I love libraries because you can find books you like—and walk away with them.

When poets are no longer relevant, they construct little universes in which they appear to be.

When reading Pablo Neruda, one might forget that the past tense exists.

A dark planet is not the solution; a sustainably illuminated one is.