I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

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.

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.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

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.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry as such.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world then it has had its desired effect.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting unstable and interactive.