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.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

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 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.