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.

Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.

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.

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.

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

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