I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

As a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It's not all inherit in the poem.

There's always some place to go. You don't need workshops, you don't need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.

I mean, when I was young I could write all through the night and I loved to work late into the night. Now that I'm older I work really well in the early morning when your synapses are firing a little better. But I work at different times of the day.

Emily Dickinson calls previous poets her kinsmen of the shelf. You can always be consoled by your kinsmen of the shelf and you can participate in poetry by going to them and by trying to make something worthy of them.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.