This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness.

Sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

There's always been what I would call the William Carlos Williams strain, in which poems of simplicity and clarity are valued by a different community. I was talking to Galway Kinnell one day, and he said that there was an audience for poetry up until about 1920 and then, from that point on, the poets and the critics drifted.

This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness.

One movement that I find interesting - this is not a movement in poetry necessarily, but there's a movement on a lot of campuses now called eco - criticism. It's a body of theory based on how nature is treated in literary works. That sort of interests me.

There are mornings when everything brims with promise, even my empty cup.

I've written some poems that are in the middle ground - who are in between very challenging and abundantly clear, but there's a tremendous investment in the challenging poem, and it's been going on so long that the whole infrastructure supporting it, a lot of critics and theorists and so on are deeply invested in maintaining that status.