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.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

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.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

No one determines your truth but you.You can’t paint your own self-portrait with someone else’s hand.

Some women are good-looking … until they change their hairstyle.

Exercises cultivated self-reliance - the foundation of courage.

The man who does evil to another does evil to himself, and the evil counsel is most evil for him who counsels it.

Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.

His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.

Strong women leave big hickies

And I played in jazz band as well during all three years in school.

I guess I'm lucky to have been blindsided. I'm lucky to have gotten into fistfights, in a way. I'm lucky I learned how to stop them.