Sometimes the title comes to you at the beginning, sometimes it comes at the end. The very best way in my experience is when it comes in the middle.

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.

And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.

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

My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader. And so, as a reader you have a task to do in finding those bottles and opening up the messages and experiencing what's in them inside of yourself.

Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.