“One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.”

“If I were to choose between the power of writing a poem and the ecstasy of a poem unwritten, I would choose the ecstasy. It is better poetry.”

“He's never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme.”

“Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t. ”

“One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.”

“If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.”