Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry all that he has learned about poetry is only a partial assurance.

Once every five hundred years or so a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife who was very smart about poetry.

I love painting and music of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction but often it's really just about the money the perceived prestige.

Well the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words that is to say the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry but obviously like everybody I have a set of criteria for reading poems and I'm not shy about presenting them so if people ask for my critical response to a poem I tell them what works and why and what doesn't work and why.