The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

And my experience is the best titles, for me, emerge in the process of writing. They don't usually come at the very beginning and hopefully they don't come at the very end because then it's getting late in the day.

And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, "Wild Gratitude," and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title "August 13th."

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.