I use poetry to explain myself to myself. It is a way of investigating who you really are, what you feel, what survives the pressure of writing. There are a lot of things that you can't write down because they aren't true. You can only put down what holds water at the time that you are doing it.

I think that my early poems were probably more concerned with time passing because of unfulfilled desires or yearnings. Now, I feel younger than I felt when I was a young old man. Now I want to live as long as I can.

Identity is the continuity in a personality that survives through various vicissitudes, through change.

I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be. I thought I'd try it, and I'm still trying it, 40 years later.

Poetry is always in transformation. There are certain aspects of contemporary Italian poetry that are very preoccupied with politics and deconstruction and they don't deeply interest me. But that's the case in most cultures. We have our own Language Poetry, which doesn't interest me either.

I love to publish new writers, and we do so consistently. But a lot of contemporary American poets sound alike to me. They want to bring spoken, prosy language into poetry and I understand that desire. But they don't edit. It's not very curated work. It seems very lackluster, very uncareful. It may be the un-carefulness is also something they intend but there's a kind of "So what?" quality to a lot of it.

I use poetry to explain myself to myself. It is a way of investigating who you really are, what you feel, what survives the pressure of writing. There are a lot of things that you can't write down because they aren't true. You can only put down what holds water at the time that you are doing it.