I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.

You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.

Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.

The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through.

I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.

Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.

The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes

And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.

In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.

Time well-spent is life well-lived.

(Parentheses speakMore than we dare say out loudWhy, oh, why is that?)

No one is a failure until that is the only definition of themselves that they are willing to see within.

For a long time, I've distinguished between entertainer and performer and entertainer and artist. To me, an entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself.

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

I don't think my sense of humor has changed at all; I was born with this, for better or for worse.

I have referred to myself as an accidental activist on more than one occasion.

I love sports. I love animals. I love kids. I want to save the world. So how do I combine all those things? I don't know

Oregonians aren't the only ones who recognize the extraordinary service and sacrifice of their state's National Guard.