I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.

What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

I write poems from dreams pretty frequently. It's limiting to think the poem has to come from a sensical lyric "I" stating things clearly or dramatically. This whole course is trying to say there are millions of ways to approach writing a poem.

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.

I grew up spending time at my grandmother's farm in Germany and she lived a few kilometers away from the border between east and west Germany. It was so strange that roads which used to connect two towns now ended in the middle.

I think all poetry is accessible in a certain sense if you spend enough time with it.

One of my favorite titles of an art piece is "Première Communion de Jeunes Filles Chlorotiques Par Un Temps De Neige" or "First Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in Snowy Weather" by Alphonse Allais. It's essentially a joke of a title, since the accompanying image is a simple white square.