Quote

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.