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.

In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.

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

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.