 The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity. |
| Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other. |
| The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me. |
| Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about. |
| The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it. |
| There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something. |
| I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way. |
| I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing. |
| I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets. |
| I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then. |
| Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated. |
