I'm really interested in culture because it is such a powerful human force, particularly in America where we think it's all about the individual.

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

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.

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

Teachers have been heroes to me, as well as artists and writers, and I'm honored to be among their ranks. There is always a lot of grousing about the academy. I suppose it comes from our all-American anti-authoritarianism.

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.

As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.