I resist thinking of myself as a teacher. I think of myself as a writer who has pulled a fast one and hoodwinked this institution into giving me a job and health insurance.

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.

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.

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

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.

You probably have to split yourself in various ways just in order to survive, and to think of yourself as a multitude.