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.

For me teaching has provided community and livelihood and the satisfaction of passing along what I've learned to others.

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

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 don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.

Life seems complicated to me; I feel confused a lot of the time by life. I feel confused about the fact that we can be so tender as creatures to one another, and so monstrous at the same time.

I'm interested in thinking about how are we contributing to the culture, what we can write that might help us deepen the culture, make us more reflective, make us more empathetic, make us feel our connectedness in other ways.