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.

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 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 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.

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches one to fear and sorrow real poverty.

Our Heavenly Father has provided many delightful inns for us along our journey, but he takes great care to see that we do not mistake any of them for home.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

My rights all spring front an infinitely nobler source - from favor and grace of God.

The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.

This is a tried and true genre directed by a guy who's famous for character work. This could take a genre picture and lift it and elevate it. That was my thinking.

I actually met Chick Corea in New York, where I was staying with a bass player friend.

Music is the chalk to the blackboard of life. Without it everything is a blank slate

It's always great when you want scientific fact to get a really good science fiction writer to talk to you about it.

I hated my work. It never seemed to me to be what I should be doing.