You need to be distracted.

The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone.

I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

Singing has nothing to do with poetry, except as twins separated at birth.

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak.

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.