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

Poetry dovetails contradictions.

Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

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

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.

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.