I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand.

...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.