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.'

One cannot have success in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer.

I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an Ohio Poet this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.

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.

There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

Because I wake up late, my day is often short. I'm much more active in the evenings, during which I alternately read, write, needle-point, smoke, email, and despair over my decision last June to put my television and DVD player out on the street because I wasn't getting enough work done.

I am like a table that eats its own legs off because it’s fallen in love with the floor.

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

Different drinks have different metaphorical weight. Wine's heady, gin is poisonous, vodka's cold, and beer is plain boring. In real life, I'm a big fan of boxed white wine, much to the dismay of my more refined friends.

It takes a certain kind of mind to narrate, to work through character motivation, to be unforgiving to one's writer-self when it comes down to creating the minutiae of detail. Writing fiction requires stamina, a sense of how people's lives work, how people work toward and against one another and, above all, precision.

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.

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.

The fiction writer has a lot of balls to juggle. Setting, pacing, dialogue, and so on. And let's not forget: plot. That was always a hard one for me. And I always had this spastic tendency to wrap up a story before I'd seen it the whole way through, a sort of writer's pre-ejaculatory tendency: The End!

I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.