Poetry is a tree with very deep roots and while there may be excitement about this or that new little branch, you're not going to make anything original by just doing whatever's being rewarded at the moment.

Whether the poet is living or dead, they're part of our imaginative community.

From the beginning. I was a poem-writing child. I wrote little novels in my composition book when I was eight, nine years old.

There are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me.

Spanish and English have such different music, and in my own poetry I feel much less drawn to fluid sounds than I do toward the hard sounds and rhythms that come out of the Anglo-Saxon roots of English.

I think we're always most interested in the things we're doing right now.

I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems.