People want poetry and need it - we need what's not honored by the corporate mentality that has taken over. It gives people a language for responding to the violence, the shallowness, the near-nothings, the toys we're all supposed to want. It's a way for people to be able to connect with themselves.

There are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me.

From the beginning. I was a poem-writing child. I wrote little novels in my composition book when I was eight, nine years old.

I think we're always most interested in the things we're doing right now.

I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don't feel as if I have it.

I'm trying to stay open to the idea that the Internet is not the evil foe of publishing but the handmaiden that will turn out to be a blessing for poets and writers.

I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems.