For the poets, my hope is that they will, quite simply, feel the obligation to be really informed about the situation in which we find ourselves, in terms of our imperiled planet. You should inform yourself so deeply that it becomes part of your nature, part of your voice.

I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.

I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

A lot of times students will come up to me and say, "Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such." And I say, "That's why you have to write." You don't wait until you know, because then who cares - it's static.

Sometimes it gets talked about as if life is all about the individual, and I don't think it is. I'm really interested in what writing can contribute to a kind of cultural intelligence.

I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.

What keeps me level is the refusal to let the best of human aspirations die in the face of the challenges. I make a moral decision to be hopeful.