Writers want recognition, audience, some corroboration that all those hours at the desk and in daydreams add up to something in the esteem of others.

I came to teaching late - not until my forties - which is one reason why I'm not burned out.

I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.

Sometimes it gets talked about as if life is all about the individual, and I don't think it is. I'm really interested in what writing can contribute to a kind of cultural intelligence.

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

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.