I'm trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn't write if I didn't need to be making those discoveries, if I didn't feel the perpetual ignorance of being a human being.

I think you have to live inside your contradictions and find a way to accept that that's the human condition - to be forced to live in contradiction.

I'm always trying to ask myself both "Who am I as an individual?" and "What are the cultural forces that have made me the person that I am?" How can I understand myself as a cultural creature as well as an individual? I'm really obsessed with that question, and always asking my students to consider it.

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

Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.

The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.

I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.