The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?