Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

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.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.