I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

What's a word, a talisman, to hold against the world?

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.

Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.