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No one here likes a wet dog.

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I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough ...more

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The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' T...more

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One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car...more

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There's something very authentic about humor, when you think about it. Anybody can pretend to be serious. But you can't pretend to be funny.

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If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equ...more

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When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable...more

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I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies of...more

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People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. Tha...more

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Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And t...more

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You know the parlor trick.wrap your arms around your own bodyand from the back it looks likesomeone is embracing youher hands grasping your shirther f...more

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I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, an...more

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It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkabl...more

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This is what I think aboutwhen I shovel compostinto a wheelbarrow,and when I fill the long flower boxes,then press into rowsthe limp roots of red impa...more

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I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.