I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

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

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

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

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.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

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.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

The compensation we receive from employment is not enough for the time being wasted

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.

A father is the template of a man Nature gives a girl

Friendship is so weird. You just pick a human you've met and you're like, 'Yep, I like this one,' and you just do stuff with them.

Sometimes, when you want to make a difference in a person's life, stay out of it.

Prophecy, that universal and perpetual torch by which faith is enlightened.

I like when people take chances.

Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment.

Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out.

this interesting subject, which, if the condition of man is to be progressively ameliorated, as we fondly hope and believe, is to be the chief instrument in effecting it.