Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.

Much of our lives involves the word “no.” In school we are mostly told, “Don't do it this way. Do it that way.” But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.

Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.

Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.

A nation's art is the expression of its soul.

I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.

Sometimes the best revision of a poem is a new poem.