“Another trouble with poetry – and I’m gonna stop the list at two – is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry.”

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.

You’ll find i-poetry, you’ll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.

I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.

I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there’s always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.

Death is what makes life fun.

I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You’re out in the open field. You’re actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it’s easy to criticize something you can understand.

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion,

You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight.

In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.

Bugs Bunny is my muse.

You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.

Usually the poems are written in one sitting. There’s always a groping towards some satisfying ending. But I’d say the hardest part is not writing. Once the writing starts, it’s too pleasurable to think of it as a difficulty.

I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn’t know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Perception is a tool that’s pointed on both ends.

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

The brain is the highest of the organs in position, and it is protected by the vault of the head; it has no flesh or blood or refuse. It is the citadel of sense-perception.

Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.

The brain is the citadel of sense perception.

Other people’s ideas of us are dependent largely on what they’ve hoped for.