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.

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 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.

We often bow down to our feelings without realizing how fickle and unreliable they are.

To be very wealthy, you have to program yourself as a machine with targets to reach.

It's like watching a car accident, that reality TV.

I like people, for a little while.

America is the only developed nation in the world with no guaranteed paid leave of any kind. That means we're leaving a whole lot of talent on the sidelines.

[What's beautiful about my mother is] her compassion, how much she gives, whether it be to her kids and grandkids or out in the world. She's got a sparkle.

It doesn't matter if you have something greater to say per say, just enjoy what you're doing.

Our ideals of freedom, set forth and realized in our Constitution, are our greatest export to the world.

Without the confidence, nothing can be accomplished.

We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.