What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

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.

Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. . . . Fennel . . . smelling of changes to come.

One has to get rid of the self. Once the self is thrown away, nothing is lacking. You start overflowing and blossoms start falling on you.

It's inspiration that counts, not the drill.

Nothing is predestined: The obstacles of your past can become the gateways that lead to new beginnings.

No other American city is so intensely American as New York.

Victor Oladipo is like a baby’s bottom – smooth and sometimes explosive.

I'm from New York. I will kill to get what I need.

You don't have to turn this into something. It doesn't have to upset you. Things can't shape our decisions by themselves.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.