I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.

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

Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.

I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.