No matter how sheltered [my students] are, no matter how their parents try to do right by them, every single one of them, you know, every single one of us, that's what we all face. And so it's made me - that's the one change I've marked in myself - it's made me change in the way I relate to my students. I've become a different teacher in that way.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

In a way, this kind of insight or recognition often permeates the way I think of character, how I plot action, and the way in which I use imagery, seeing binaries as false.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.