When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.

Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.

I wanted to write some words you'd remember.

Words so alert they'd leap from the paper,
crawl up your shoulder, lie by your ears,
and purr themselves to you like baby kittens,
but it was rainy, so I laid there and daydreamed about you.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn't really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don't want to solve problems in poems that haven't been solved in the world.