The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things at risk, not just poetry.

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

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

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

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.

The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.