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

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.

The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.

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.

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

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.

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.