Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue.

When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.

I am like a table that eats its own legs off because it’s fallen in love with the floor.

The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems.

I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all.

One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader.

One cannot have "success" in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer.

I've just always loved animals. So I've often thought that if I weren't a writer I'd work for some nonprofit organization that does something positive for animals.

I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.

I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.

Great changes in our society are always inspired and set in motion by one person. Be that person today.

People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.

Polka dots can't stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environments.

No man has a right to judge Andrew Johnson in any respect who has not suffered as much and done as much as he for the Nation's sake.

Every reformation ruins somebody.

If one is not happy, one has lost the very purpose of life.

The dogs with the loudest bark are the ones that are most afraid.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

Fans are almost always nice. I really find that they rarely come on too strong.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.