The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.

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.

I think there are different kinds of poetry for different stages of life and there's the wild, exuberance of youth, there's the painful agony of midlife experience, there's the late poetry in the presence of death.

think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.

I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

I would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because we need readers of poetry as much as writers of poetry.

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.