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.

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.

So, some of the most difficult formal poems that I've written, say one sentence sonnets, I've been able to do those fairly quickly whereas some of the clearest, simplest lyrics that I've written have taken me the longest to get to the clarity of feeling that you're looking for.

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

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.

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.

A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.