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

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.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.

I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship.

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