Teaching has given me a community that cares about poetry, and I'm grateful for that.

It takes courage to get clear about what your vision of the work is and to be persistent about it and pursue it, whatever you're saying. I'm still in a long learning process.

People need what they think of as a poem to be read at their bar mitzvah, their wedding, a funeral, whatever. And people are looking for hope and inspiration. I understand that.

Rhythms and sounds are often the first thing I hear and want in a poem, so I can't imagine trying to translate something without at least being able to hear what it sounds like.

Spanish and English have such different music, and in my own poetry I feel much less drawn to fluid sounds than I do toward the hard sounds and rhythms that come out of the Anglo-Saxon roots of English.

I think we're always most interested in the things we're doing right now.

Poetry is a tree with very deep roots and while there may be excitement about this or that new little branch, you're not going to make anything original by just doing whatever's being rewarded at the moment.

I think translation is an impossible job, and I admire the people who do it in a way that brings poetry to us that we wouldn't have access to.

After I started publishing poetry I got to teach creative writing. Eventually I was promoted and even got tenure. But then I felt compelled to drop everything and move. But I've been teaching for a long time. More than four decades.

People want poetry and need it - we need what's not honored by the corporate mentality that has taken over. It gives people a language for responding to the violence, the shallowness, the near-nothings, the toys we're all supposed to want. It's a way for people to be able to connect with themselves.

Whether the poet is living or dead, they're part of our imaginative community.

I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems.

I worked in an art gallery for a few years, doing administrative assistance stuff, and it exposed me to what the whole world of art dealers and the art market was about.

My books have come many years apart and each one seems to reflect a period of experience. Ending the book is like putting a period on a certain movement. Interior and external - both.