But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.

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

Then I found another one, grandpa's poem. It turned out it had been written by Emily Brontë and it wasn't my grandfather's poem at all, although my response to it, I think, was pretty much the same, I just had the author wrong.

I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.

She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything.

The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.

As a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It's not all inherit in the poem.