...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source..

There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is i….

When I began to dare to be clear, because I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're ac….

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally..

I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we're drifting away f….

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life..

A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried..

…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found..

You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than….

I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that po….

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is….

No one here likes a wet dog..

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his t….

I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey f….

I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together.

Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There's always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I'd say the hardest part is not writing. O….

So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart..

All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time..

To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has ….

Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards...I don't….

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness..