…balancing The Wish To Be Lost With

I Think What Gets A Poem Going Is An Initiating Line. Sometimes A First Line Will Occur, And It Goes Nowhere; But Other Times - And This, I Think, Is A Sense You Develop - I Can Tell That The Line Wants To Continue. If It Does, I Can Feel A Sense Of Momentum - The Poem Finds A Reason For Continuing.

I Think A Good Poem Should Have Some Inscrutable Part. You Can't Quite Explain It. The Poem Can Only Explain Itself To A Certain Limit And At That Point You Enter Into A Little Bit Of Mystery. That For Me Is The Perfect Poem: To Begin In Clarity And To End In Mystery.

The Literary World Is So Full Of Pretension, And There's Such An Enormous Gap Between How Seriously Poets Take Themselves And How Widely They're Ignored By Everybody Else.

I Was An Only Child, A Very Late Child, Born To Parents Who Were Both 39 At The Time, Which Was Very Late Back Then. That Kind Of Confirmed My Sense Of Being The Center Of The Universe, Which I Guess Every Child Feels - Children And Poets Both Tend To Feel.

Until Recently, I Thought 'occasional Poetry' Meant That You Wrote Only Occasionally.