So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine.

There's a lot of unconscious activity that goes on I think in the composition of a poem.

To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form.