I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.

There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find.

And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."

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.

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.