A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.

A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.

There are no ordinary feelings. Just as there are no ordinary spring days or kicked over cans of paint.

Go down any road far enough and you'll come to a slaughterhouse, but keep going and you'll reach the sea.

Just because we have birds inside us, we don't have to be cages.

Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.