I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?