I turned to human suffering because - this may sound odd - animal suffering is more difficult for me to deal with.

I figure I write for people who are intelligent enough to do some labor. Lazy readers are not my ideal readers.

Revision is a good impulse to have.

I pay editors. I never ask friends or colleagues to work for free.

I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home.

One of the things I'm constantly telling my students is that they're never going to write a poem everyone gets, or if they do, they've failed. They should leave someone behind every time.

I like to move around in the landscape between poetry and prose, between the lyrical and the narrative.