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

The imagination is an organ of understanding. And the imagination needs all the faculties at hand, all the sensibility, all the conscious and unconscious intelligence it can galvanize to fulfill its luminous mission.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.

And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."

I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.