All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

The First Book: Go ahead, it won't bite. Well... maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world -- just the world as you think you know it.

The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.

I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.