Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.