When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.

With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them.

"Similar but not the same" - that's like the return of the beloved for me. And metamorphosis: the spirit of the beloved moving through things, not lingering long in any one thing or place, no matter how we might wish it.

Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry.

When you're a young poet, reading is a search for your lost family.

Every breath is a resurrection.

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.