I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.

You can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting. You can pack something in salt so that it's well made and you can hope that it outlasts time. But, ultimately that's not up to you.

I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.

Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.