I am reading Patti Smith's M Train, and it is Patti Smith just the way I love her, flexing her literary chops, her prose so fine and evocative, rhythmic like a train itself. I am not finished with it. But so far, she's mentioned talismans at least twice. And now it's in my head and I have an idea: to do what I did for so many years, which is to notice all the magic and miracles all around me all the time, the talismans that carry messages. Patti Smith, in her punk godmotherly

I'll always remember: This is the golden latte I was sipping and gripping when someone asked if I was a writer. I had a notebook and a pen-- actually, two notebooks and two pens. The Clairefontaine notebook takes the gel pen, the tiny Moleskine notebook takes a rollerball. I was filling pages in the large Clairefontaine because it's my journal and I was in Sayulita and there was so much to reflect on-- the way life moved here, the spill of the flowers on balconies, the dogs d

Poems, like most great art, are the art of telling the truth of life just as we live it. I learned this in the work of Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Ilya Kaminsky. Sometimes the truth can only be fully realized, in me and in the world, as a poem. It doesn't render as richly to describe a few minutes at the park by telling you that I sat in the grass at the park and enjoyed it. Instead, I describe how soft the spring grass was behind my hea

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