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

We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.

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

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

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.

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.