As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

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

Are there any religions on your list that include the slaughter of noblemen as a holy duty?

The P's of life:Passion, Persistence, Perseverance.

Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free.

If you become a star known for one thing, that becomes your thing, and you don't want that, on some DNA level.

Setting is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

Some Democrats deserve to be criticized.

Heaven is not the wide blue sky but the place where corporeality is begotten in the house of the Creative.

Wow, you're never allowed to sleep late again. You're crankier than a fat guy in stilettos.

From the first time you laughed with me, all those months, and all those stories,” Joe said quietly. “They were all you, to me. All of them were you.

I'm gonna go live in a cave, just completely live in my interior world.