Now, as I've gotten older I've been able to write more quickly. Sometimes I get in the space of something and I can do a lot in a day.

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.

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.

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.

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.