I do think most poets are in denial about what the real taboos in writing are--the real boundaries.

It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.

It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.

Today, from the bridge, the East River is sparkling. The money is swirling around the tall buildings like tides or like tithes, And I wonder, does anyone swim in this river, I wonder, does anyone pray?

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit. As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.

The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth--along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets--have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.

To think of the myriad ways that we live is to think of the ways that we die: Delinquent in our brains, in debt-- If we settle, then, our due account and walk through the forest, Will we finally be free?