I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.

Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.