To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people.

If you close your eyes to see the view, you miss everything surrounding you

A man is worked on by what he works on.

Any prudent business looks at the reality and how to maximize our investment.

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.

We stand in life at midnight; we are always at the threshold of a new dawn.

I believe very firmly in the principle of free agency - people making their own decisions and doing what they think is right.

I've stolen a couple of hearts and they are in my private collection!

The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.