I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things at risk, not just poetry.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

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

So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.