Different drinks have different metaphorical weight. Wine's heady, gin is poisonous, vodka's cold, and beer is plain boring. In real life, I'm a big fan of boxed white wine, much to the dismay of my more refined friends.

I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all.

There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.

I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.

I admire the poetic relationship to place as enacted in Wallace Stevens' poems; his poetics strikes me as an argument against the restraints of realism.

I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.