Poetry is an art spoken, as if sung, in relation to other human beings.

There's not a big range in the political poetry of the last year, or not a political range. On the one hand, no poet that I know of who writes in English in the United States is anything but a humanist. So all poets, including myself, seem to be under that umbrella. We just don't have Rush Limbaugh poets, Ann Coulter poets.

For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.

Poetry is an art spoken, as if sung, in relation to other human beings.

I think I did experience culture shock. When I first arrived in Boston, I was basically told to go home. "Homeboy" is what they called me - very funny. I didn't take offense. I just thought, This is exactly where I want to be. The pace was different. Houston is a sprawling city. Boston is just crammed into the size of a postage stamp.

Literary lineage is part of your autobiography. The authors are the literary base, the image base, the character base that you bring into your civilian work. Same with film, architecture, music, sports. That's one tributary of the autobiography.

I'm not going to tell people how to write, but we do have a skill set, and the more we put ourselves out into the world as poets, as a sort of poet of the tribe, as representatives of metaphor, and try to claim space for metaphor in the inner life, that's going to be important and be helpful to poetry and bring a tension for poets writing about whatever they choose.