The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute.

I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don't read or overhear the voice in the poem - you are the voice in the poem.

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I'm using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.