Teaching has given me a community that cares about poetry, and I'm grateful for that.

There's always some reason not to be writing and I regret the times I give in to that, because then writing feels strange - I feel like I have to reinvent the wheel. There are poets who don't have to do that.

Whether the poet is living or dead, they're part of our imaginative community.

People need what they think of as a poem to be read at their bar mitzvah, their wedding, a funeral, whatever. And people are looking for hope and inspiration. I understand that.

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 love that people want to know about poetry. It's one of the ways of keeping alive.

Spanish and English have such different music, and in my own poetry I feel much less drawn to fluid sounds than I do toward the hard sounds and rhythms that come out of the Anglo-Saxon roots of English.