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.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.

It's not important - it's not necessary that you read everything. What is necessary is that you care about things that you read and that you find something that really matters to you and you try and make something like that.

And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, "Wild Gratitude," and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title "August 13th."

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.