I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.

When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

Poetry isn't an efficient tool for preserving experience, any more than it's an efficient mode of communication, but who says that it should be efficient?

I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.

It makes sense to me that the polyglot wouldn't know what language he dreamed in.

As a species, we create tools to control our environment. What excites my imagination is wilderness: our materials' ability to escape our control.

If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently?