When asked what I'd be if I weren't a writer, I'm tempted to respond with one of father's favorite phrases, one I despised while growing up: "I hate 'what-ifs.'"

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'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.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

With my ninth mind I resurrect my firstand dance slow to the music of my soul made new.

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal

I am not a bat. ~Rephaim

The batshit kind of love that makes no sense at all… and at the same time… all the sense in the world… That is us… You and me

Cosmopolitan discourse...provides one with a _public gaze_ with which one can relate oneself to others in a different way.

I didn't want there to be a computer on stage. When I see people with computers on stage, I think, 'Are you sending e-mail?' That's so corny.

Conceptual art is entirely word-bound. It is, in fact, the kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description.

I think baseball has moved on in many ways and the focus on the competitions on the field is really what the game is all about. It seems to be healthy. It seems more people are watching it.

If the game is run properly as a professional game, you do not need 57 old farts running rugby.