What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up

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

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

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.

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.

Compared to her, Sam ran like a girl and told himself as much.

When I was a teenager, I was in an iron-lung.

I don't want to develop a personality, just cut my face! Stretch it and staple it. Now I'm happy, or at least I look like it.

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

You don't have as much time as you think you do. You got to operate like there's a sense of urgency!

The only thing that happens when I'm teaching is that I hope there are some students out there in the class who will ask questions.

May I feel like I feel when I'm about to eat cake.

When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.

Inner peace comes only as we maintain the integrity of truth in all aspects of our lives.

I'm not an introvert. I'm media shy.