Not everyone is going to like every carnival ride.

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.

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.

Encountering rhyme out of the blue is like finding a long-lost twin (fraternal), or a suitcase that closes with a particularly satisfying click.

Communicating with the federal government is like talking to a computer that's crashing.

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

We set ourselves limits, but we are all strong enough to aim higher, to achieve our goals. All we have to do is find such strength within ourselves. Know how to develop it.

Oh yes, well, I find myself unconventional everywhere.

If you asked me to I'd let you in my life forever. from If You Asked Me To

Far worse it is, To lose than never to have tasted bliss.

I'm a singer and as long as I can sing - which, thank God, is something that I still seem to be able to do - I'd like to carry on making records.

You look back, and it was important to bring back instrumental music, and it was great to be a part of that wave of instrumental rock music. And clearly it was something I was destined to do.

Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.