The inner and outer, the visible and invisible, the abstract and concrete - you've got to get the balance right (not that I do, but it's something to aim for).

I wonder if books become in essence "files" if people wouldn't write them differently. I'm used to writing print books and I enjoy the slowness of the whole process. It makes me more deliberate about everything I say.

Sometimes you get lit students that know a lot about the canon but virtually nothing about contemporary poetry and vice versa. I like to mix things up.

In Chicago, if you tell someone you're a writer, they look at you suspiciously - as if to say "yeah, right." In New York, people don't question the idea. If you say you're a writer, that's what you are.

In a machine, every part has a function. In a poem, every word needs to be there.

I never liked the philosophy that you can have everything and be everything and that something is wrong if you don't want that. I'm terrible at multitasking and find it hard to believe that no one protests this general trend of using the rhetoric of self actualization to sell you faster and faster phones and computers, BlackBerrys, etc.

I don't write every day, but if I go more than a couple of months without writing, I begin to get a little nervous. I usually have bursts of poems. Five or six come together and then I slack off and want to do something else.