Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader.

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.

On the death of his brothers, my dad lied about his age and joined the army in 1918. He was in the trenches long enough to be gassed and contract the early stages of tuberculosis from which he would eventually die just before my birth.

Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.

With the advent of DNA, we know that people have been convicted and sentenced to death who later proved not to be guilty of the crime.