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.

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.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.

I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

Poets are born, not paid.

Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.