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.

I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.

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.

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

I think there are different kinds of poetry for different stages of life and there's the wild, exuberance of youth, there's the painful agony of midlife experience, there's the late poetry in the presence of death.

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.