A family is a mystery.

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.

When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.

Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

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.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.