I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career." My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills.

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.

Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.

You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I want someone who can trust that my big hands are going to take care of them.

I learned early on the value and the power of music to inspire and to drive me.

As Donald Trump continues to dominate the 2016 field, the Republican establishment's low-grade anxiety is becoming an all-out panic

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

Nuclear weapons can be dismantled, but they cannot be uninvented.

I have never been able to wear a hat. My hair is peculiar in that it grows so fast that any hat I put on instantly leaps from my head.

I've always gotten myself overly involved in supporting other women who've not always been as supportive in return.

What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom?