When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone.

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.

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.

Then I found another one, grandpa's poem. It turned out it had been written by Emily Brontë and it wasn't my grandfather's poem at all, although my response to it, I think, was pretty much the same, I just had the author wrong.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.

I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.