A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.

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

One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

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.

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.

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