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

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.

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.

Encountering rhyme out of the blue is like finding a long-lost twin (fraternal), or a suitcase that closes with a particularly satisfying click.

An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy.

Your mind can be either your prison or your palace. What you make it is yours to decide

There is as much wisdom in listening as there is in speaking - and that goes for all relationships, not just romantic ones.

Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools.

Art is real and imaginary, two worlds rolled into one - the fulfillment of the artist's insatiable soul.

I have never been able to understand why it is that just because I am unintelligible nobody understands me.

I think the wrong things are kept private

As compromised as their marriage might be, part of her still believed in her vows. She loved the man he'd been, and she loved the man she knew he could be.

The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.

Fear and its accompanying emotional reactions have become part of the public mindset. Such reactions, while often legitimate, are also being exploited with increasing frequency for political ends.