A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.

I’ve always thought of myself as shy.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.