When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

All poetry comes from repetition.

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.