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 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.

I'm extremely interested in science as the mythos within which I live. Science tells me what kind of animal I am, what kind of a universe I live in. It's always deepening my understanding of the natural world.

A lot of times students will come up to me and say, "Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such." And I say, "That's why you have to write." You don't wait until you know, because then who cares - it's static.

Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is the poor citizens of the world who will suffer the most from our excesses.

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.