Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write.

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything