In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.

I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.

What's really important for me is, as an old man, I'm known by my own generation and the next generation know me, too.

Sometimes I am kind of the opposite of my character. But that's the thing about acting, you get to play people who are not like you at all.

No one dies a virgin, Life screws us all

To do the Ozzfest again would be great. I'd like to finish with a final Sabbath album. You always feel that it is still a challenge.

I have had a long tug-of-war going on with the FDA, in particular, and with other regulatory agencies, and it has nothing to do with vaccines.

See what you see, not what someone tells you that you see

I never eat salad. I make sure I don't put a lot of junk into my system, but I hate vegetables!

A good discourse is that from which nothing can be retrenched without cutting into the quick.