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

I encourage my students to be honest in their assessment of both the published work we read and the work of their classmates. I think there's always the occasion for discussing elements of craft, whether the student's poem is terrible or quite wonderful.

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.

It takes a certain kind of mind to narrate, to work through character motivation, to be unforgiving to one's writer-self when it comes down to creating the minutiae of detail. Writing fiction requires stamina, a sense of how people's lives work, how people work toward and against one another and, above all, precision.

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.

One cannot have "success" in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer.

Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems.