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

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

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

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.

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."

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.

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.