I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them.

The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.