When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.

I want language to help us live in a world of wonder/terror/change. I want it to be about "becoming" rather than "being." I think that being and nouns are part of our hopeless dream that time will stop and we will not die. but it's not that way. So, why not celebrate verbs and the beloved's metamorphosis into other people or creatures or places - the same spirit but moving through things, not static.

In Eden I "saw" that Adam or Eve probably spoke each word FOR THE FIRST TIME and that seemed wild and seemed to me that that might have brought them to some essence of language. Once I "saw" the city, I knew it was real. once I saw that a poem was a house, i knew it was real and could go back to it or else write a flurry of poems around it, both worked.

When it's right you can't say Who is kissing whom.

Every breath is a resurrection.

Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry.

I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.