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.

The really authentic thing about humor is that anyone can pretend to be serious. Anyone who's ever had a job - in fact, we're pretending to be serious now, more or less.

The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkable men and women anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabitized things a million forgotten hours.

…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.