Keep growing. Stay awake. Beware of gurus. Keep a low overhead.

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.

I worked in an art gallery for a few years, doing administrative assistance stuff, and it exposed me to what the whole world of art dealers and the art market was about.

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

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