Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.

Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings.

It's the process of writing and life that matters... We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.

You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try.

I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.