I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.

Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.

I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.

Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.

Poems can't help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.

Erasures are interesting to me because they prove what particular sieves we all are.

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

Let's fly away and live forever

Remember, buying something is not the problem. The problem comes when we believe, for that moment, that the object we’re buying is going to make us happy.

God wants my life to be about being successful and being happy and blessing other people and being blessed.

The man who cannot endure to have his errors and shortcomings brought to the surface and made known, but tries to hide them, is unfit to walk the highway of truth.

If I write when I'm low, it will be a dark song, but I don't care. I want to be honest with myself at all times.

Just saw a t-shirt at the gym said, body by torture. That's a lot less ironic if you're a political prisoner in the Middle East.

What is difficult about learning - any kind of learning - is that you have to give up what you know already to make room for the new ideas. Children are much better at it than grownups.

I say it's a girls' world.

Everybody wants to win.

Common sense is both more rare and more desirable in leaders than mere intelligence.