Death is what makes life fun.

I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.

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

But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.

One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.

Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards...I don't know if anyone's reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.