All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.

If freedom in the imagination is a privilege, it's one I believe everyone should have, as a basic human right. I also believe that poems not only make meaning, but are more often than not engaged in some way with our deepest human issues, be they personal or societal or political.

All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.

Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too.

That is a horrible thing in a way, but it is the one thing poets can bring back to experience, this intense focus on language, which activates words as a portal back into experience. It's a mysterious process that's very hard to articulate, because it's focused entirely on the material of language in a way, but in the interests not just of language itself whatever that would mean - that's the mistake, by the way, that so many so-called "experimental" poets make - but in service to human experience.

There is all this stuff about how sensitive poets are and how in touch with feelings, etc. they are, but really all we care about is language. At least in the initial stages of the process of writing the poem, though later other things start to come in, and a really good poem usually needs something more than just an interest in the material of language to mean anything to a reader.

It is absolutely vital to preserve a space where the mind, by means of poetic thinking, can move in a free, even anarchic, way. It must do so, in order to find deep truths that would not be otherwise available, ones that we desperately need. Anyone who writes poetry knows what I'm talking about, because they've had the experience of thinking this way.