A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

Moon In the Window I wish I could say I was the kind of child who watched the moon from her window, would turn toward it and wonder. I never wondered. I read. Dark signs that crawled toward the edge of the page. It took me years to grow a heart from paper and glue. All I had was a flashlight, bright as the moon, a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

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.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

It's difficult to talk about [W.S.] Merwin's poems, as it's hard to talk about a feeling or a smell. It is what it is, but so much so that it overwhelms both sense and the senses. I aspire to something about his work, that imbues his poems, though I'm not sure I could say what that is. A purity, maybe, the kind of purity that comes from being beaten, like steel.

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

I'm not the only person in the world who is suffering. I'm trying to talk to the world, responding to those voices.