What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.