After I started publishing poetry I got to teach creative writing. Eventually I was promoted and even got tenure. But then I felt compelled to drop everything and move. But I've been teaching for a long time. More than four decades.

Poetry is a tree with very deep roots and while there may be excitement about this or that new little branch, you're not going to make anything original by just doing whatever's being rewarded at the moment.

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.

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.

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.

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