I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.

No one, evidently, except me has found "No Alarms" poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write.

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

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.