You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don’t mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.
I’ve been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You’re sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you’ve read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
We sometimes received – and I would read – 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.
Community means people spending time together here, and I don’t think there’s really that.
I don’t know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it’s there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
I don’t think it’s by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.
I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I’m teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.
I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I’ve ended up doing that myself.
I’m addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things – being able to buy a book on the internet that you can’t find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.
My mother was told she couldn’t go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.
With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.
The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?
Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.
There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.