At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.

The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it's wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.

So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.