She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything.

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.

I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.

And a lot of poetry is putting yourself back into the state of wonder that you have before things when you're a child. It's not only a joyous wonder, it's sometimes a grief stricken wonder.

Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.

A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find.