“The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’”

A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole’s charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.

I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

The sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader’s part in the poet’s autobiographical life, in the poet’s memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.

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 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.

Today the strategies of many companies in the real estate industry are premised on low interest rates.

Although you may spend your life killing, You will not exhaust all your foes. But if you quell your own anger, your real enemy will be slain.

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.

That is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to do this.

And nothing fuels a good flirtation Like need and anger and desperation No, the moth don’t care if the flame is real.

Real film is light; digital is electricity.

But the world is out there, and it understands that the illusion of knowledge and freedom is not the same as the real thing.

Real sacrifice. Real disappointment. Real failure. And it requires the ability to scrape your sorry ass up off the floor, stumble to your feet.