I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, "That's so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather's poem."

Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.

And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.

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.

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

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.