The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.

Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.

I do believe that a poem needs to remind the reader of his or her own humanity, of what they are, of what they're capable of. Awaken them, in a sense, to the fact that there's a world in front of their eyes, that they have a body, they're going to die, the sky is beautiful, it's fun to be in a grassy field when the sun is shining—those kinds of things.

Silence is the only language god speaks.

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.