As poets, we're writing into the void, and we're not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conversation or a letter, mean the world.

I am a relatively rational being and I like to create order in poems. I like meter, I like rhyme, but ultimately I don't know where the poems come from, and I feel, at least in the beginning, that I'm taking dictation from my own dream that I don't remember.

As poets, we're writing into the void, and we're not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conversation or a letter, mean the world.

Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff's in my coffee. / You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.

All writers know in advance that they are not going be able to reproduce in its wonderful fullness the thing that's in their heads; we're going to get some corner of it. We're going to do the best we can, but we already know it's beyond us.

Part of what the imagination does later in life is it's linking you not just to who you are now but to all the people you've been.

The one concession I've made as I've gotten older is that my children are now adults and they're in their twenties and thirties and so I'm careful about how I write about them. I may write about them as a child, but I'm not going to write about their current struggles because they're adults and they can do it for themselves. I want to give them some space in a way I didn't when they were younger.