“Humor is just an ingredient. It’s always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it’s found its way back. And it’s simply an ingredient.”

But people that are worried about unborn babies are the same ones that vote against kindergarten programs in Indiana or school lunch funds out of the federal government.

I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we’re drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.

But I think you could also put it a different way. You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

The entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

I’m very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem. And that the ending of the line is a way of turning the reader’s attention back into the interior of the poem.

Beauty is the result of realizing what is special about you and not focusing on the things you don’t like.

One of these days I’m-a make me a book out of you.

…pleasure, of course, is a slippery word…. Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure’s source.

You describe your life in negative terms you will find that this will reinforce your mind’s negative emotions and make you unhappy and even more susceptible to feeling unhappy in the future.

Urges … every man has urges. But the true measure of man is to admit them, to learn to control them. The Shield used to refer to themselves as the most dominant force in our universe. But that ain’t the way I remember it.

Until recently, I thought ‘occasional poetry’ meant that you wrote only occasionally.

I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when “Howl” and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up.

But some nights, I must tell you, I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep. I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness. I sing a love song as well as I can, lost for a while in the home of the rain.

You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don’t have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

I used to get mad because nobody else would play Miami. Notre Dame would play them, then drop them. Florida dropped them. Penn State dropped them.

Like when I finally got away from the east coast for a while, and I came back there was just this underlying anger that I never noticed before, because I was born there and just dropped right into it.

I dropped out in ’64. And I came back to Michigan, in ’65. In 1965, when I came back I had never heard of Vietnam.

You have the unenviable choice between being dropped off last or being dropped off first and having a bunch of losers who can’t afford cab fare and have no friends or loved ones with cars knowing exactly where you live.

Life brings what it brings. I might be young but I’ve learnt this: prepare for each blind corner with your strongest shoulder dropped, ready to smash through whatever is thrown at you next.