A Motto I've Adopted Is, If At

Life Is A Loaded Gun That Looks Right At You With A Yellow Eye.

To Write Poetry Is To Be Very Alone, But You Always Have The Company Of Your Influences. But You Also Have The Company Of The Form Itself, Which Has A Kind Of Consciousness. I Mean, The Sonnet Will Simply Tell You, That's Too Many Syllables Or That's Too Many Lines Or That's The Wrong Place. So, Instead Of Being Alone, You're In Dialogue With The Form.

I Try To Presume That No One Is Interested In Me. And I Think Experience Bears That Out. No One's Interested In The Experiences Of A Stranger - Let's Put It That Way. And Then You Have Difficulty Combined With Presumptuousness, Which Is The Most Dire Trouble With Poetry.

There Are Interesting Forms Of Difficulty, And There Are Unprofitable Forms Of Difficulty. I Mean, I Enjoy Some Difficult Poetry, But Some Of It Is Impenetrable And I Actually Wouldn't Want To Penetrate It If I Could, Perhaps.

I Thought Originally When I Was In School And I Wanted To Be A Poet, I Knew That Poets Seemed To Be Miserable.