“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.”

“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.”

“We suffer each other to have each other a while.”

“..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.”

“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.”

“People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.”

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