“If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem?’ But you become resigned. Your job is to write about the life you actually have.”

“The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.”

“I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.”

“I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.”

“Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.”

“Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.”

“Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.”

“One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.”

“When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.”

“The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.”

“Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.”