Words floating in air, lines cut on a page, stanzas carved into units. Poetry is a mode of associative thinking that takes a different route to knowledge than philosophy, its ancient antagonist. It follows its own wayward but resolute path.

I think that's a connection that you can only hope for. It's not something that you can make because it needs someone else.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.

And it was the title August 13th for most of the way and then near the end, sometime in the process, I got the idea that maybe that would be a somewhat bland title and I got the idea for wild gratitude, which I'm very proud of as a title. So, I think it works best when you find it in the process.

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.

I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.