Visual media is the dominant art form in our present day culture, whereas poetry is, at best, a proxy. Yet poetry and film are both "dream factories."

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.

I will not feel, I will notfeel, untilI have to

If love is a flame, I am an inferno...

How are you managing? And don't say you're fine."It's true. Whatever the opposite of fine is, that's what I am.

We experience a discomfort that may be foreign to others, but that pain opens up a world of beauty. Wouldn't you think?

Actors always want you to believe something else even though that's the truth and to do that well it's almost a dying art.

Shark Tale feels borrowed, sampled and dittoed from the collective funniness of the past 10 years in studio-made animation.

I love receiving fan mail.

Use the new technologies for the old purposes.

Love is short, forgetting is long, and understanding longer still.

Let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible. . . . For this is the way of happiness.