I should be writing a poem every morning but I'm not.

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

Every old poem is sacred.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

It's always like you write a poem when you can't really say what you're trying to say.

Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.