“Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.”

“I would read the Shel Silverstein poems, Dr. Seuss, and I noticed early on that poetry was something that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try to think of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other kids were like, "Oh, man. We have to write poems again?" and I would have a three-page long poem. I won a national poetry contest when I was in fourth grade for a poem called "Monster In My Closet.”

“Beautiful words ruin your poetry. A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it inton the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous. You belief a poem must be beautiful, or it can have no excellence. I am right? Sort of. Your "sort of" is annoying. A yes, or a no, or a qualification please. "Sort of" is an idle loubard, an ignorant vandale. "Sort of" says, "I am ashamed of clarity and precision." So we try again. You belief a poem must be beautiful or it is not a poem. I am right? Yes. Yes. Idiots labor in this misconception. Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue.”

“I go in and slip a note in Jane's locker, which I've gotten in the habit of doing. It's always just a line or two that I found from some poem in the gigantic poetry anthology my sophomore English taught me from. I said I wouldn’t be the kind of boyfriend who reads her poetry, and I’m not, but I guess I am the kind of cheesy bastard who slips lines of poetry into her mornings.”

“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.”

“(W)hy is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was twenty I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for pleasure; now it lights me as I walk to think I have two acts of King John tonight, and shall next read Richard the Second. It is poetry that I want now -- long poems. I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing; having no time to waste any more on prose. When I was twenty I liked Eighteenth Century prose; now it's poetry I want, so I repeat like a tipsy sailor in the front of a public house.”