A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.

Courage has nothing to do with our determination to be great. It has to do with what we decide in that moment when we are called upon to be more.

My best times are midnight to six actually. I'll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I'll write until I get stuck or I can't go any further or I'm boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem.

If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer

Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it's very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that's one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age.

I was pirouette and flourish, I was filigree and flame. How could I count my blessings when I didn't know their names?