Popularity isn't just something that happens. You have to give something in exchange for it, and that's the dangerous part of the process.

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.

By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well.

It isn't so unusual for poems to situate themselves out of doors - though they may, at the same time, be set in an interior world: not inside the house but inside the mind and body of writer and reader.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.

My own view is that violence is a part of classical Haida literature - and of every mythology everywhere, so far as I can tell - because it's part of life itself. In the world of the hamburger stand and the supermarket, or the vegan café and the ashram, you might try to tell yourself it's possible to be nonviolent. In a hunting and gathering society, violence is more difficult to hide.