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.

Then I found another one, grandpa's poem. It turned out it had been written by Emily Brontë and it wasn't my grandfather's poem at all, although my response to it, I think, was pretty much the same, I just had the author wrong.

Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves.

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

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things at risk, not just poetry.

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.