I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.

I'm filled with despair. We live in a pathological culture filled with rage and bitterness and greed. The hate-mongering and racism is reaching a frightening pitch.

I was attacked by two dogs when I was three and a half years old. I'm lucky to be alive. My face was stitched back together and here I still am, gratefully so. I believe that experience shocked me into a deep alliance with the animal world, its beauty and viciousness and terror.

I grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you're wooed by the music of language; you want to put that into your practice.

I'm just really interested in the interface of the individual with the collective. I think that's where the arts live.

What I like about teaching is the discipline of finding words to unpack the artistic process. And I admire the drive in students who want to write, the mystery of how artistic talent unfolds.

I'm always writing towards a discovery. When I'm writing poems in particular, I'm often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, "I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them." I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem.