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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.

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I tend to use iambic pentameter instead of the Alexandrine, which sounds odd in English, which is more abbreviated than French anyway. It's a pleasant challenge, and it's an interesting form.

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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.

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I wouldn't recommend that anyone go to university at 15. It really is like giving a fifty-dollar bill to a child and turning her loose in a Godiva chocolate shop.

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The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

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In France, the initial entry into publication in journals depends much more upon pre-existing connections and allegiances.

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Editing a journal is a different kind of engagement. You are free to engage yourself only with the work that first engages you, whether it's by someone by whom nobody has yet read a line, or by Adrienne Rich or Hayden Carruth.

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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.

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When you are in a university, paradoxically, it makes those intergenerational relationships between writers more problematic.

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The narrative quality of Khoury-Ghata's work-narrative inflected by surrealism and by tropes from Arabic poetry - appeals to me.

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Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

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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.

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Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

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I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

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It's rather paradoxical that the major strains of contemporary French poetry move rather far from what I'm doing.

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Neither Claire nor Venus would, I think, identify herself as a feminist: that word is much more easily accepted in the Anglophone world.

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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.

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Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

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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.

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Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.

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