Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

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.

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

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

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

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

Poetry dovetails contradictions.