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

Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn’t give public readings very often, certainly not – there was no circuit of schools.

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 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.

Supply and demand regulate architectural form.

The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.

While money can’t buy happiness it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.

I regard texture similar to the function of taste buds in our mouths. But in a visual form.

You really can’t justify anything else but giving your whole attention to spiritual formation in Christ.

If we do not make formation in Christ the priority, then we’re just going to keep on producing Christians that are indistinguishable in their character from many non-Christians.

Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get.

More ocean than terra firma. More shadow than form.