Something I have "authority" on is animal rights. If I were not already so deep into the path I've taken, deep in the woods, I would probably work with animal rights activism because that's really where my heart lies. I think our relationships with animals are sacred and horrific. I've been a vegetarian since I was sixteen. What God said we are allowed to eat anything that does not have thumbs?

I want a poem which is made of compression, passion, precision, symmetry, & disruption.

At the heart of my life is the idea that I don't ever want anything to ever change. That's the basic tenet.

Let me just say that the politics that I have are never the politics of poetics. I am not interested in politics. Politically, I am only very conscious of how we live and what we do right and what we do so awfully wrong.

Poetry is the skin that I have between my body and the world's body.

I find it odd that, in real life people think I am funny but no one ever suspects that on the page! Personally, I think some of my work is a riot! I crack myself up, but I know that the poems seem so relentlessly dark.

I wanted many of the poems to have long legs. At first I was calling them clothespin poems, before I knew what I was doing. The lines seem pulled on either end, tight and taut against the wind.