People love discovering you. The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs, you're their friend.

Poetry is my politics. It's an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.

People loved to talk about how Frank O'Hara didn't really care about getting published. That doesn't jibe with my experience.

Art feels like it has this frame, and it's either outside or inside.

I always think of childhood as the inarticulate moment, and you have your little camera. You were filming it, recording it, you just didn't know how to speak it.

I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life — not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.

When people decide to talk publicly about poetry as an art form and how it's received, they often get very abject about it: "Nobody reads poetry," and then a thousand people write back, "No, we read poetry." There's an abundance of this negative preaching to the choir, and it's very similar to the experience I'm having.