“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.”

“Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.”

“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.”

“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.”

“As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.”

“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.”