All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life..

Always in search of the question that might make you ask me one in return.

If freedom in the imagination is a privilege, it's one I believe everyone should have, as a basic human right. I also believe that poems not only mak….

That choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet..

A poem is like a person. The more you know someone, the more you realize there is always something more to know and understand. A final understanding….

Not that I play guitar anywhere near as well as she sings, but I think I have always had a tendency to play solos the same way, in emotional relation….

What poetry is asking us to accept can be difficult. Our proximity to our mortality, the fragility of our existence, how close we live in every momen….

So for whatever reason those short lines just felt right to me, in my physical self. They were right for the movement of the poems. Some poems in the….

Milton on speed. I am going to need about a decade to think about that. That delay in syntax, the putting off of the click of the sentence into itsel….

This, in the end, might be the greatest social good of poetry: to get us to live differently, with a different sort of thinking and concentration, ev….

I see sad crushed plastic everywhere and put some thoughts composed of words that do not belong together together and feel a little digital hope..

There is all this stuff about how sensitive poets are and how in touch with feelings, etc. they are, but really all we care about is language. At lea….

Mahmoud Darwish wrote that "extreme clarity is a mystery." That sounds right to me. I don't want anyone hunting for anything ancillary to the true my….

It is funny, and also a bit sad, that poets are so often asked to justify our vocation. There seems to be something vaguely mystifying and even hilar….

I personally believe the role of poets as poets (which is something different from our obligations as citizens, community members, humans) is to writ….

Thinking in prose is different. I gained an immense amount of respect for people who write prose, and also felt even more sure that the thinking part….

For me, form is something I locate in the process of writing the poems. What I mean is, I start scribbling, and then try to form the poem - on a type….

That name, SUN BEAR, just sounds like an ideogram to me. Super resonant. By the way, this all might be related to Tomaž Šalamun's famous line, "Every….

Something can be symbolic without being a mere stand-in or vessel, which just brings us away from the true mystery and dread, into some boring versio….

I've always been more than a little mystified by poets who seem to think talking to people as directly as possible is a bad thing. I mean, I don't wa….

Well, I believe that "thinking" is just as real a phenomenon in the world as anything else, and just as worthy of exploration. Maybe even more? So wr….