“We just watch anything speed by. To stop and really ponder what a product label says, or the tagline on a TV commercial, might be inherently silly. Those are things that are almost designed to be thrown away.”

Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn’t saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.

The brands with which we surround ourselves prop us up, make us feel sexy and beautiful, when in reality we’re pretty dumpy creatures.

Surprise keeps the reader awake. The only alternative is to continue saying what the reader is expecting. What fun is that?

Nothing is as easy or natural as consumer brands want us to think – no problem is as resolvable. Your hair will fall out, eventually. Yet we do have these brands, and we line our shelves with them. There’s an inherent irony.

Whenever I do a comedy show I still just read poems, some of which are intentionally funny and some of which are just bizarre. The mix seems to work well.

I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they’d taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.

I don’t really want to write fiction at all. I don’t see why fiction is necessary when we have real life already confusing enough.

Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they’ve forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

After the first few readings in comedy venues I did begin to write for laughs. There’s something so gratifying about stimulating laughter.

Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I’m making little star maps when I write poems.

At a major label you can start to feel that you’re working for them, and that any work you do, you’re never going to see any benefit.

I feel the same way about all my friends. To me, the exact relationship between me and someone else doesn’t matter much. But people want to label everything… So I guess I seem indifferent in that way.

White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything – you know what I mean?

They want to sign distribution deals with labels, who have lots of product, lots of artists.

Knowing record labels and knowing the kinds of things they would object to-they just object to everything that’s interesting.

If you’re an artist trying to put out your own record on your own label, it’s hard to get a distribution deal because no one wants to sign a deal with one entity.

As soon as you believe that a label you’ve put on yourself is true, you’ve limited something that is literally limitless, you’ve limited who you are into nothing but a thought.

I have never gotten into the label thing.