Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you..

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' ….

When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of bein….

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And ….

I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and righ….

I'm very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of ….

One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you..

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation, by the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him ….

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation.

When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that wer….

Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse ….

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a g….

There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose mean….

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is….

I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil..

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found..

It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine..

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it ….

Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn't give….

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice..

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you'r….