I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place - in this culture - to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best.

Nature is a catchment of sorrows.

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

... people get confidential at midnight.

To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.

The tougher the form the easier it is for me to handle the poem, because the form gives permission to be very gut honest about feelings.