My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

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

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I never was bereft so utterly. The winter evenings drift dark to the window. Not one work will make you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake from your night toward me. The only gift I got to keep or give is what I've cried, floodgates let down to mourning for the dead chances, for the end of being young, for everyone I loved who really died. I drank our one year out in brine instead of honey from the seasons of your tongue.