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.

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.

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.

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

The rest, is silence.

I love reading.

When you knock off work tonight, go looking for Toby, because, trust me, he will be looking for you.

When we are called before God and His throne of judgment, it will be too late to reverse our decision. It is during our lifetime here on earth that we decide our eternal destiny.

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.

Whatever parent gives his children good instruction and sets them at the same time a bad example, may be considered as bringing them food in one hand and poison in the other.

My website bulletin board is the place I interact with my readers.

We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.

I don't know how to change the world but I know if I keep talking about how dirty it is out here, somebody gon clean it up.

A CEO's behavior has a huge impact on managers down the line.