By clarity I don't mean that we're always in kind of a simple area where everything is clear and comforting and understood. Clarity is certainly a wa….

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems..

There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem..

When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold ….

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

You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine..

I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Lark….

I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I'm not speaki….

You'll find i-poetry, you'll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question th….

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean you're not free to try. A….

I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose wr….

I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be ….

I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of oth….

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….

But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love son….

I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type ….

High School is the place where poetry goes to die..

I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm making some tonal adjustments, a….

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….

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of cr….

I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one's interested in the experiences of a stranger - let's….