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

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

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.

I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.

Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.

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.