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

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

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.

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.

As a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It's not all inherit in the poem.

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.

And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.