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

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.

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

And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, "Wild Gratitude," and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title "August 13th."

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.

A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of 'The Inferno,' 'The Divine Comedy,' to help guide him through the underworld.

In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, "That's so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather's poem."