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'm old-fashioned enough to really still believe that the poem is an object to be memorized, venerated... I still believe in that kind of poem. A lot of poets today don't, they want to get away from the poem as object. They want something looser. Unfortunately, a lot of it is boring to me.

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

Italian is a very different poetic situation and there are these hard and fast rhythmic periods, settenari, ottonari of seven and eight syllables. These are fundamental to the way people speak and write and breaking them is more radical in Italian than when we break a line. I'm sure there are Italian poets who want to write poetry as prose and break these Petrarchan rules. And breaking them is fun and a valid thing to do. But I'm more interested in trying to write poetry that absorbs tradition and uses it in new ways, and doesn't throw it out.

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.

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.