I farm a little plot of things to say, with not much frontage on the busy road.

I try to be realistic with students. And say that there's a good chance that they're not going to get a creative writing teaching job, that there aren't enough jobs to go around and the university faculties are cutting back on staff and that they may have to get some other kind of work. None of them wants to hear that, but it is true and I think I'm a good example for them of somebody who took the other route.

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.

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.

The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful.

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.