I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.