I want to reach the status of becoming a mogul. And the only way you get there is by work.

Every poem that I write is, in a sense, trying to find adequate words for this unspeakable word, around which my entire life turns.

I took my daughter to the father-daughter dance and I cried like a little baby. She's 11 years old, so seeing her get dressed up and pretty made me cry.

I got a dog with a Napoleon complex. I have a Napoleon complex. We're small. Anything big that we feel is threatening us, we want to fight. We're not a pushover.

I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role.

Everybody that's successful lays a blueprint out.

You've got to put yourself in positions to take away what can be said.