The imagination is an organ of understanding. And the imagination needs all the faculties at hand, all the sensibility, all the conscious and unconscious intelligence it can galvanize to fulfill its luminous mission.

The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.

And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, "It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me."

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.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader. And so, as a reader you have a task to do in finding those bottles and opening up the messages and experiencing what's in them inside of yourself.

I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves