My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

When a philosopher, scientist, or psychologist discusses the discrepancy between the actual and the ideal, he or she attempts to convince us with the tools of discursive thought ... An artist does it differently ... their primary approach is different, even though both groups, if you will, are investigating the actual, the ideal, and the discrepancy in between.

I never read Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier." I've been reading books that I should have read years ago and did not. That's one of them.

I had not read George Eliot, so read a few. I felt ashamed I hadn't read "Middlemarch" before.

Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry.

Other than fiction and poetry I tend to read history.

I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.