Juan Felipe Herrera

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers.

— Juan Felipe Herrera

They are standing up and they're crying…and their emotion is coming from all the emotion we're experiencing collectively.

— Juan Felipe Herrera

I believe in beautiful messes…I like to splatter a lot.

— Juan Felipe Herrera

Poetry, with the breath of the poet, the heart of her life, joined by millions, pushes forth with the creative forces bestowed upon us. A wall is a plaything before the positive. It will take time. Change comes — rumbling with letters and caesuras, chants, odd-angled rhymes and earthy people power.

— Juan Felipe Herrera

Beauty, suffering, power and culture are all related. We cannot tear away from reality. It is better to live with all things, then to cut ourselves off and fester in a segmented mind.

— Juan Felipe Herrera

I think it’s one of the major responsibilities of the poet. As poets we tend to not like the word “responsibility”. We prefer “freedom”, we want to be as free as we can, but freedom and responsibility can go together. We’re responsible because we’re writers, and we’ve been at this all our lives…

— Juan Felipe Herrera