I switch between fixed forms and free verse often, and enjoy being a poet who can "swing both ways," so to speak.

I think that the people who really accomplish things in this world have to have a little bit of crazy in them.

I like when a poem ends on its "receipts," meaning it gives me something tactile or tangible to dwell on as I exit the reading experience. So I strive to end my own poems that way as well.

I write to be recorder, observer, participant, and sometimes, even judge. I want to engage the world as I see it with my whole self - all of those different aspects of it.

Poetry is such an ancient art, and I consider myself young within that art.

I write a lot, and then forget what I've written, and then come back to it and say, "Not bad, I should do something with this!"

Only after my father's death could I speak my own individual truths about him. In a sense, I had to turn him into a character, a figure I could control through language.

Part of elegy is confrontation - not just with the idea of death, but with the person who has died.

I lived a life I knew I had to hide My father's edicts resolutely grim.

Editing is work, and it's hard to do while working on one's own writing.

I never did quite fit the glamour mode. It is life with my husband and family that is my high now.

Pride is generally censured and decried, but mainly by those who have nothing to be proud of.

Men do not settle down. Men surrender.

A lot of the reasons why something is a favorite thing are all things you don't necessarily see, the place, the people, the time, where you are, what it meant to you at the time.

The alliance should agree... to an effective NATO role against the new threats presented by international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

Try taking a stand on just one leg. You need to see both sides.

The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.

I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him.

It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.