The students always, always surprise me.

I love people and psychology. As a writer, I’m not so interested in Fred getting from the living room to the car. I want to go inside Fred’s soul and play there.

The changes that have occurred in poetry have been minor when you look at it over the scale of human time. It's like a rose, maybe a hybrid with color and size differentials, but the same genus, plucked from the same original blowsy family.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in.

The reason I started writing was because I was a little kid in San Diego who was getting beaten up by her dad and sexually abused and because I felt different than everybody else and I had this big huge secret that was tearing me apart.