Bugs Bunny is my muse.

No one here likes a wet dog.

Death is what makes life fun.

Write the poem only you can write.

I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

High School is the place where poetry goes to die.

One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.

The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.

…balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

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

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word accessible.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

All I wanted was to be a pea of being inside the green pod of time.

The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.

I'll listen to anything authentic whether it's bluegrass or gospel or blues.

But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest.

I'm an only child, and I can take all the attention you manage to pile on me.

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.

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

I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly.

But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.

The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.

There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.

Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.

A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.

You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

I don't write for an auditorium full of people. I don't write for the microphone; I write for the page.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

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

I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky.

I'm easily frightened, and I've also come to realize that old Catholic guilt or remorse is easily stimulated.

I'm a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of the most comically brilliant writers today.

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

It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.

It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.

...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.

I'm going through life's cycles at an alarmingly fast pace, but my persona has a Peter Pan quality: he doesn't age.

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

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