“A door jumpsout from shadows,then jumps away. Thisis what I've come to find:the back door, unlatched.Tooled by insular wind, itslams and slamswithout meaningto and without meaning.”

“Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.”

“But, no one can tell without ceaseour humanstory, and so we lose, lose”

“That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.”

“..in the last few years American poetry has come out of a poetry of complaint, not praising, and it was initially maybe rich. And it can continue to be rich if we remember that we shouldn't write out of complaint. We should write out of grief, but not grievance. Grief is rich, ecstatic. But grievance is not -- it's a complaint, it's whining.”

“Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.”

“You thinkof a woman, a favoritedress, your old father's breaststhe last time you saw him, his breath,brief, the leafyou've torn from a vine and which you hold nowto your cheek like a train ticketor a piece of cloth, a little hand or a blade--it all dependson the course of your memory.It's a place for those who own no placeto correspond to ruins in the soul.It's mine.It's all yours.”