I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.