Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it's always your turn - I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it's under way, there is a sense of flow.

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.

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 more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.

The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.

But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.