Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

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.

The students always, always surprise me.

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 am the flesh boat of my experiences, we all are , my feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams are captured in my body's pliant cells, fastened onto my DNA.