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

I think that's a connection that you can only hope for. It's not something that you can make because it needs someone else.

She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything.

So, some of the most difficult formal poems that I've written, say one sentence sonnets, I've been able to do those fairly quickly whereas some of the clearest, simplest lyrics that I've written have taken me the longest to get to the clarity of feeling that you're looking for.

So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.

One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.

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