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

There's always some place to go. You don't need workshops, you don't need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

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

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

When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.