Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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