I think poetry involves heightened noticing or imagining as well as creating a certain made shape. On the other hand, that shape can be made just by pointing at something and saying, "That's a poem".

I'm all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality.

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.

Whether you're talking about political borders or aesthetic divisions (and clearly, the political ones have much more tragic consequences), it seems like once they are created, we want to patrol them, enforce them.

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.

"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion.