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

I always think W.S. Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporat….

More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficul….

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable..

As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing -….

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 ….

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….

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're igno….

The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who's ever had a job - in fact, we're pretending to be seriou….

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

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody ….

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

You know how sometimes you just have a memory of looking up and seeing a face looking over your crib and then remember nothing until tenth grade? - I….

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….

The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper..

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

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the p….

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

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….

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God..

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is th….