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

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

No one here likes a wet dog.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice.

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over the rooftop. It is just me thinking about being you. And before I headed back down the hill, I walked in a circle around your house, making an invisible line which you would have to cross before dark.