There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.

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.

There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.

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.

I would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because we need readers of poetry as much as writers of poetry.

The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.

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.