I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

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.

Scholars of the Hebrew bible define something they call wisdom literature and I would say clearly the poetry of wisdom is something that comes with age or that might come with age which has to do with reflecting on experience.

I think one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.

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 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.

A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.