Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.

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.

Meditation is not to be on the surface of a thing or underneath it or above it, but it is to be in everywhere and to be in nowhere!

Clearly, animals know more than we think, and think a great deal more than we know.

You're my mirror image? No, I don't think so. I'm I. And you're you. & together, we are inseparable.

I was young not too long ago, and I know the last thing you want is someone preaching to you.

When there is freedom from mechanical conditioning, there is simplicity.

And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."

But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.

The face of evil is always the face of total need.