"Writing poetry is not a way of saying only what one already has the words for, but a way of saying what one didn't know one knew."

"Poetic forms, established or nonce, are like maps of places no one's ever been. They lead the writer into uncharted territory; they show the writer where to go, even though they cannot know the way. This paradox is what keeps poetic form eternally interesting....."

"The best free-verse poems take advantage of the tension between tradition and revolt, working contrapuntally....dressing down rather than up, and sometimes cross-dressing."

"Forms are what we pour some poems into and form(ing) is what we do to words to make them convey meaning in a poetic way."

"Wallace Stevens says we read poetry with our nerves; that's a real investment of ourselves--something like submitting to a lover. Incompetence in prosody, or even in diction, spelling, or punctuation, is painful to a poetry reader."

"Speaking now, it must be that this factual person, ME, is familiar, so like so many, in fact, his hair, teeth, pants etc. But the I, as Wittgenstein put it, is what is 'deeply mysterious.' In a world of objects, MES, this is the one manifestation of existence that cannot so see itself as literal THING. It is my experience that what I feel to be the creative has location in this place of personal identity."