I do think that the long poem speaks for an inner need for continuity. We live in a time of so many losses, disruptions, and distractions, that the need for a sense of the ongoing is quite real. The long poem is very satisfying in offering the psyche a model of coherence.

The world is going to be less biologically rich for quite some time in the future. We are always weeping that we live in such a diminished world, but we are experiencing a biologically rich world compared to what the future will look like. Bearing witness to that is a beautiful gift.

I'm always doing poems from a place of not-knowing, a place of ignorance in a way.

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 had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about... I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying... Beginning was awful.

The environment is becoming so much a central concern, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that we won't have these environmental poets tucked over here and everybody else doing cool stuff with language and consciousness elsewhere, but that all of it will become one thing.

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.