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

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.

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.

And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, "It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me."

Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.