.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

One of the duties of a baseball fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him.

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it's wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.