And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

Our sense that things are transient, that everything is passing and then if you want to save something from the endless flux of experience and the world's movement, you have to set down a stake and try and make something that will last.

And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. In every culture, in every language there is expressive play, expressive word play, there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

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.

A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that my childhood is very alive inside of me, very close to me, very much part of me. And it's a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous inexhaustible resource for poetry.

But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.