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.'

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.