I see myself only sporadically as a teacher and consistently as a writer. Teaching is how I pay the bills...and fortunately, for my students, I can intellectualize about writing, and I can talk about it well, and I like to talk about it.

These new theories of the universe, that there are multiple universes just bubbling up constantly - it's all pretty wild.

Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can't be anything but the lyric poem.

I see myself only sporadically as a teacher and consistently as a writer. Teaching is how I pay the bills...and fortunately, for my students, I can intellectualize about writing, and I can talk about it well, and I like to talk about it.

I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.

I was always a reader. In the fifth grade, I got some sort of prize for having read hundreds of books from the library.

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.