We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded.

I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that's something someone else has to call you. It's like bragging.

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.

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.

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.

We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded.

When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled.