I think all poetry is accessible in a certain sense if you spend enough time with it.

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.

Nature intended in her design a hearty life of toil, open fires and plump old age attended by a brood of sun-touched brats.

Be true to what naturally interests you - and be brave enough to turn an obsession into a profession.

This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.

We can see quite plainly that our present civilization is built on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilisations were built on the exploitation of slaves.

To get it first is important - but more important is to get it right.

It's a wild thing, that people have the ability to help each other by just relating to one another.

Bodies always understand each other, even when the souls do not.

There's a snap about Liverpool that just isn't there.

Confident people have a way of carrying themselves that makes others more attracted to them.

It is not what you do, but what you stop doing that matters.