The birds are in their trees,the toast is in the toaster,and the poets are at their windows.[...]The proofreaders are playing the ping-ponggame of proofreading,glancing back and forth from page to page,the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,and the poets are at their windowsbecause it is their job for whichthey are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only/responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation/until it's time to go to lunch with the other girls,/all of us ordering the cottage cheese with half a pear.

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.

I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.

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

And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.

I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.

When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.

To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place.So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form.