When it comes to gossip, I have to readily admit men are as guilty as women.
I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.
S. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle off my hand until I realized what it was and began to grant it its sovereignty.
Poetic success is when you write a poem that makes you excited and bewildered and aglow.
When I get interested in a new topic I teach a class on it. There's a graduate seminar I teach in which the students and I try to expand the terminology we use to talk about poetry as well as expand our notion of what makes a poem - we read source texts on architecture, dance, photography, film and the graphic novel.
I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.
Writing directly from a feeling of anger or sadness is difficult, but if you distract part of your brain with word games, the ignored emotion often tiptoes in.
Water and sanitation has not had the same kind of champion that global health, and even education, have had.
I can't help but be a different person now that I've had kids. That really does change your whole perspective on life for the better. I definitely feel like I've grown up. So, I guess in a way parts of me are going to be different, but in general I'm still the same girl from the Bronx who had big dreams.
Every day you run into artists on the streets in SoHo or other creative people you want to do something with. There's nothing to match that chance encounter.
In my experience lust only ever leads to misery. All that suspicion and jealousy and anguish it unleashes. I don't want those things in my life.