I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.

When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.

I am like a table that eats its own legs off because it’s fallen in love with the floor.

The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems.

I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all.

Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue.

One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader.

One cannot have "success" in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer.

I've just always loved animals. So I've often thought that if I weren't a writer I'd work for some nonprofit organization that does something positive for animals.

I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.

Love is divine force of existence.

It is easy to make plans in this world

How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble?""Soli, I'm going to tell you. He needs to go rub his soul against life. ...

One cannot sell anything to a satisfied man. Ergo, make him want something new, or take away something that he has and then sell him something to take its place.

Children can find other children to be pals. Children need fathers to be fathers.

How vain, without the merit, is the name.

Theory is good; but it doesn't prevent things from existing.

The oldest and most important currency is debt.

The difference between them and us is that we want to check government spending and they want to spend government checks.

Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.