They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.

Carry on, then, if only for the moment that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.