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.

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."

I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

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

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

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.