A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that my childhood is very alive inside of me, very close to me, very much part of me. And it's a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous inexhaustible resource for poetry.

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.

That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

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.

The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.

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