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

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.

When we're writing anything, we're bearing witness to the time we live in and how it's different from any other time in history.

It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with and the places that are endangered or being lost.

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

What keeps me level is the refusal to let the best of human aspirations die in the face of the challenges. I make a moral decision to be hopeful.