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 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.

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

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.

Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.