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

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.

So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.