I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.