My happiness is marred only by my failure to attain it.

[On filling out a grant application:] I seek an extended period of time, free from all distractions, so that I might be free to be distracted.

There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.

Polar fleece is a plush, spongy, totally artificial material that weighs nothing and conveys no quality of warmth or coolness; in fact, you can wear it in the most bitter weather or in the hottest heat. Polar fleece looks neither flimsy and light nor hearty and warm. It has no historical, cultural, or physical association with a place, a season, a society, or any living thing. It is the first existential fabric - eminentaly useful, meaningless, dissociated and weird.

Something unpronounceable followed by a long silence points out my life is becoming a landscape.

Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.

It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: 'Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!