Everybody loved me running for president in '91 and '92 because they never knew a presidential candidate before.
With Instagram, you're captioning a moment. Twitter is the caption without the image. Even if it's there, the words come first.
I wasn't afraid of being poor. I didn't want to live in a big house. I'm the perfect size for poetry. I can move around.
I always aimed at being a legend.
I wake up with a sense of wonder. I don't dread the future. I like it.
I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.
Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.
The first time I voted, I voted for Eugene McCarthy and I knew he wouldn't win, but it felt so great to vote for him, to vote for the right guy - the one who wanted peace.
Older men get lovable, and older women get monstrous.
I'd like to sit down with Hillary Clinton onstage and ask her about Glass Steagall and all the big banks and her own campaign contributions.
When we have relationships with animals, we often make up who they are.
Dogs are a companion species. It's about time - you have an animal for about 15, 16 years, a generation. That time holds so much. You might have had five or six relationships with human beings but one dog.
If I had been a good student and an achiever, I might have been excited by a more systematic approach to writing than what I do.
When somebody's in love with you, they think it's amazing you've written them a poem, and when they don't love you anymore, they hate those poems. They wish those poems would go away.
In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special.
It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.
Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.
I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.
I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will.
I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
