“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 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.

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.

There are five stages of meditation, each one leading gradually into the next: concentration, meditation, contemplation, illumination, and inspiration.

When you factor in population growth, it’s clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow.

We want to give kids something to hope for. If one kid says, “Your cd helped get me through this year,” that’s all it takes.

To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.

Inspiration is the greatest gift because it opens your life to many new possibilities.

I find inspiration everywhere. I love challenges and my favorite thing is to find something ridiculous and be like “if it’s all that I have available to me, I am gonna make it look the best that I can”.

He won me over entirely by giving Himself entirely to me.

True inspiration overrides all fears. When you are inspired, you enter a trance state and can accomplish things that you may never have felt capable of doing.