Occupation: Poet Birth: November 27, 1942
I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing..
Women love a sick child or a healthy animal; A man who is both itches them like an incubus..
You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charg….
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time….
I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been rea….
There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they….
The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained i….
The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For m….
Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over te….
The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide..
You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse..
Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?.
With, or despite our scars, we stay alive..
I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading….
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or….
I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. ….
Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equal….
Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem i….
Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about..
Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I ….
Poetry dovetails contradictions..