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.

The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we're standing, we're doing stand-up. That's exactly what we're doing.

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

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'm a poet born in the era of Andy Warhol and a generation that wanted to be famous.

I am always hungry and wanting to have sex. This is a fact.

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