I still write what I need to write - but I can't deny that something has changed when I think about sending work out. Maybe it's just growing older and feeling more responsible to the world.

My advice to my younger self would have been, "Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out."

I don't know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems.

Unlike Woody Allen, I would be happy to be part of any (poetry) club that would have me.

Over the years, I became more and more interested in the forms and techniques in which things could be said.

After my marriage ended, I had an urge to skip that part of my life completely in terms of poetry, not publish anything at all about it.

Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.

I love going to movie theaters, even in the era of movies on-demand and Netflix. When you are in a movie theater, no one can reach you by phone or other means.

If you are my friend and say to me, "Please don't write about this," I won't.

The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure.

Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College - and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one's life as a poet.

They terminate your job? Employ yourself. They retire you? Refire yourself.

My body really, really wanted to reproduce when I was 15. It took a lot of civilization, socialization, willpower and some emulsion polymerization technology for me not to reproduce at 15.

I was nervous batting eighth, and I was nervous batting seventh.

People think there's a single solution to complex problems, and the solution is often making an enemy of a group of people - pulling back and rejecting the other.

Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.

I want it to sound like an orange.

You see the transformation that the arts have on young people. It changes their lives for the better. That's where my engagement is.

Meticulous planning will enable everything a man does to appear spontaneous.

Change is not a one-way street- it involves two parties: the person who is changing and the people who notice it.

That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly.