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 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.

And a lot of poetry is putting yourself back into the state of wonder that you have before things when you're a child. It's not only a joyous wonder, it's sometimes a grief stricken wonder.

As a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It's not all inherit in the poem.

After my grandfather died I went down to the basement of my family house where my family kept books, anthologies and things and there was an anthology without any names attached to it and I read a poem called Spellbound and I somehow attached it to my grandfather's death and I thought my grandfather had written it.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

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