The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.

Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.

I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

After my grandfather died I went down to the basement of my family house where my family kept books, anthologies and things and there was an anthology without any names attached to it and I read a poem called Spellbound and I somehow attached it to my grandfather's death and I thought my grandfather had written it.

Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.