Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.

My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

I am not a playwright. A playwright would take "Antigone" and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.