We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.

It's very hard to write humor.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.