Many of the poets I most admire have a way of embodying their peculiar obsessions via landscape that can sometimes seem magical.

I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though.

My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.

I tend to employ braided narrative threads in the lyric, so often echoes (of phrases or images) will occur and will hit my ear so I can shape different resonances and shifts in tone.

I think the grotesque can inspire intimacy (it draws us in) as well as awe, like the cabinets of curiosities.

Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials.

I’m tickling a traced pattern over her bare hip. She’s pretending to sleep. Her smile is an idiot. A bad secret keeper.

The way that other people judge me is none of my business.

An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.

You have to have talent to design and to dress thousands of women or millions of women around the world. And you know very well, the only thing they want is to look more beautiful.

Sting's my ideal man, because he's a real man.

It's funny --- sometimes the strongest individuals feel the worst when events are out of their control, and they can't really be there for the people they love. I've felt it myself.

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form

I don't doubt the sincerity of my Democratic friends. And they should not doubt ours.

Everybodys constantly being destroyed and rebuilding themselves, some more drastically than others.