“I am that last, thatfinal thing, the bodyin a white sheet listening,”

“..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.”

“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.”

“I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff, then there's no gift, one way or the other.”

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

“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.”

“a bruise, bluein the muscle, youimpinge upon me.As bone hugs the ache home, soI'm vexed to love you, your bodythe shape of returns, your hair a torsoof light, your heatI must have, your openingI'd eat, each momentof that soft-finned fruit,inverted fountain in which I don't see me.”