I do a lot of readings.

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

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.

It's really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.

You see beauty, not with your eyes, with your beloved heart.

The Americans believe they answered all first questions in 1776: since then they've just been hammering out the practical details.

To be able to travel the world, especially to places I never thought I'd be... it's really, you know, still fascinating for me.

The press made me something I really wasn't and I tried to live up to what they made me.

A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.

One of the ways I think I gain fodder for characters is by watching people.

Writing, as I experience it, means wringing out the heart/mind until it stops lying.

The typical American believes that no necessity of the soul is free and that there are precious few, if any, which cannot be bought.

Men who can hear the Decalogue, and feel To self-reproach.