Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards...I don't know if anyone's reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established.

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

The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.

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

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.

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.