I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.

I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening.

A poem is like a score for the human voice.

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not.

In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.

The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem.