I learned to write with my desk in the living room, next to the TV. But mostly in my head, and I try to be able to do it under any circumstances.

I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.

I think about the body kind of all the time, being as how I'm really uncomfortable in mine.

I'm always glad that other people are way smarter about my poems than I am.

I hope I can write toward my interests. But poets should be afraid of too fluidly responding to what they're interested in.

There's no such thing as an animal too big too kill, AND we're cornered by such animals every day.

I learned to write with my desk in the living room, next to the TV. But mostly in my head, and I try to be able to do it under any circumstances.