When she left me I stood out in the thunderstorm, hoping to be destroyed by lightning. It missed, first left, then right.

If I don't take the risk, I'll wind up with a bloodless poem. I have to be out there on the edge.

There's nothing wrong with delighting in what you do. In fact, most of the fun you'll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing.

For a while the creative writing community sort of sprung out of places like Iowa and Syracuse. The graduates sort of went out, and they would found creative writing departments in the little colleges where they went, and then some of those would found other ones. I mean every college has got a creative writing department, so where are the jobs coming from? There are not any jobs out there.

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.

When she left me I stood out in the thunderstorm, hoping to be destroyed by lightning. It missed, first left, then right.

Just as a dancer, turning and turning, may fill the dusty light with the soft swirl of her flying skirts, our weeping willow -- now old and broken , creaking in the breeze -- turns slowly, slowly in the winter sun, sweeping the rusty roof of the barn with the pale blue lacework of her shadow.