[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either. 

I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be nourished by thinking about it? You've already ingested it, and you've excreted it, and that was two months ago. You had this fabulous meal. It's not going to keep you satiated today. You have to go out and get your next meal. For me, that's writing. I have to go out and hunt my next meal.

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.