The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
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.
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.
I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.
i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.
Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.
Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
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