Poetry never makes any money, and so there's no pressure to appeal to an audience. That makes a lot of things about being a poet difficult, but it also means freedom to write whatever you want to write, however you want to write it.

History is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

[L]ike poems, cruising carves privacy out of public spaces. Poems are a kind of private communication that occurs in public speech. And I think cruising is that too: a training in reading occult codes; a way of seeing a significance in the world that most people don’t see.

the whole point of literature, I think, is that it’s the best technology we have for communicating what another person’s life feels like from the inside.

You can't speak to him, he said, if you speak to him, if you give any sign to him at all, he will come back; he has to stop existing for you.