The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader and that meaning doesn't exist or in here in poems alone.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.

A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that my childhood is very alive inside of me, very close to me, very much part of me. And it's a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous inexhaustible resource for poetry.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.

I just think that limits the kinds of experiences that people can have with poetry. But, poetry will survive; I don't worry about that. But, I do think that it may save fewer souls if people can't pay attention.