The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?

i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.