I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality.

Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.

I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.

Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.

Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

Sacrifice of the self is sheer stupidity if sacrifice is not for the self.

I guess I'm a bit of a romantic.

My credibility is zero. My wife claims she can go before any judge at any time and have me committed.

If you find that you have no love but desire to have it, do the works of love and the Lord will see your desire and effort and put love in your heart.

I avoid the young adult section altogether if possible, although it's sometimes fun to catch a girl lying on the floor, reading "Gossip Girl."

America is an insane asylum run by the inmates.

The small countries of the world are as important as the big nations.

This is the real tragedy of mankind, that until now the spirit of man has not been able to free itself, even along the path of its own development, from the tentacles of self-deception.

The man who must brag for himself knows that no one else will