I wanted to rock back and forth between myth and distant futures, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It felt a bit like prophecy and a bit like storytelling.

My self-editing process is intense.

I suppress the vast majority of what I write.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

I think, for me, humour needs to be used like a strong spice - sparingly.

A sequence works in a way a collection never can.

Well, we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars, but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets.

I do try to let what is obviously unintended yet naturally good stay in.

I'm not interested in being easy anymore. Readable, yes. Easy, no.

It's a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway.

With 'Carousel' I had an idea and it all came out quickly.

I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.

In my opinion, Al Moritz may be the best poet of his generation in Canada.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

I wanted to rock back and forth between myth and distant futures, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It felt a bit like prophecy and a bit like storytelling.

Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.

I think the main influence has been living in New York City. Aside from all the crap around 9/11, I find it very demanding to think amid all the noise and visual pollution.

The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.

I feel as though I've fooled the world into thinking I'm an adult and now they're letting me procreate.

I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.

New York was breaking my concentration and disintegrating my thoughts.

I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.

I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.

In fact, in some ways, I actually feel much more confident about the quality of Carousel than I do about The Cottage Builder's Letter: probably because of its cohesive nature.

The whole competition thing disturbs me. Not that I wasn't a part of it when I first started.

I am certainly suffering from a modicum of performance anxiety.

I guess there is also an element of deliberate change involved. Each of my books has been, at least from my point of view, radically different from the last.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

I always looked for a man to rescue me and bring me happiness. I bought into that myth, of course, and looked for my own Prince Charming.

There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.

Something fundamental about the myth of the Jew has resurfaced.

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It used to be called psychosis.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

You know why we're stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don't let themselves feel things.

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

Myth is supposed to bring us together, but fantasy alienates us.

Nothing will see us through the age we're entering but high consciousness, and that comes hard. We don't have a good, modern myth yet, and we need one.

From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.

There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.

Today's Communism can survive only if it abandons the myth of an infallible party, if it continues to think, and if it becomes democratic.

I believe that global warming is a myth. And so, therefore, I have no conscience problems at all and I'm going to buy a Suburban next time.