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.

Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems.

The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it’s in the world, you can’t follow it. You’d have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I’m surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all.

New York is one of those places people tend to derive a sense of identity from – as if, were to you to remove them from the City, they’d turn limp and colorless.

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.

One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader.

When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot.

I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.

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