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.

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

Fear is the brother of hate.

If you’re dating a writer and they don’t write about you — whether it’s good or bad — then they don’t love you. They just don’t. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring.

If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.

I love chaos.... It's the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.

Don't forget Yemen, where there are also extremist elements, as we saw recently.

Mexico and the USA are friends, partners and allies and should continue to work together for competivity and development across North America.

The more I study men, the more I realize that they are nothing in the world but boys grown too big to be spankable.

Blakes Hotel in South Kensington was a particular favourite of mine during what I affectionately think of as my Restless Years.

Jameel McCline acts as if attacking Wladimir Klitschko is akin to attacking Russia during winter

Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.