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

We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.

I'm really interested in culture because it is such a powerful human force, particularly in America where we think it's all about the individual.

I am a result of what has happened on this planet - how could I find the art to say that? I can't, and yet, I am drawn to it because of the enormity of it. That seems really important.

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.

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.