Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn't give public readings very often, certainly not - there was no circuit of schools.

I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand.

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean you're not free to try. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole's charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

You'll find i-poetry, you'll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow.

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