As poets, we're writing into the void, and we're not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conversation or a letter, mean the world.

I am a relatively rational being and I like to create order in poems. I like meter, I like rhyme, but ultimately I don't know where the poems come from, and I feel, at least in the beginning, that I'm taking dictation from my own dream that I don't remember.

Political poetry is the hardest thing to write because you cannot preach to the converted, and if you're only seeking to convert, then write an editorial. I hope I can write about Trump; he's too major a force not to be written about.

A number of people have written poems about Trump already, and I salute them. He is so beyond anything we could have imagined and yet, in another way, he has to be seen as a mirror of America. Our country wouldn't have elected him if he didn't reflect something in our country. In my view, it's a negative thing that's being reflected.

Part of what the imagination does later in life is it's linking you not just to who you are now but to all the people you've been.

Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff's in my coffee. / You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.

And I said to myself, here's the problem with the world: The Italians are too Italian, and nobody else is Italian enough.