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.

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

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.

All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real.

Technology is transforming everything. Who knows what it's doing, we don't really understand it.