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

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.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

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.

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.

Scholars of the Hebrew bible define something they call wisdom literature and I would say clearly the poetry of wisdom is something that comes with age or that might come with age which has to do with reflecting on experience.

I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.