There's been a fragmentation of how the market functions, but I believe printed books are here to stay. People like the tactile experience, the smell of them; there's a great romance to them.
After college, I went to England and studied for a couple years.
I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?
Claiming your life for yourself feels like a huge deal until you do it.
When you're in the throes of writing, I find, the lessons you've casually imparted to others are not in the forefront of your mind. Which may be good or bad. Probably both.
I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.
I can write anywhere that's quiet. I have a study in my apartment, but I often work in the kitchen of a house that we rent in the country.
I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
The price of an e-book is a lot less than the price that we're charging for a hardcover book. It's about the same as we charge for a paperback. And that means a different revenue stream.
If you've worked in a company for a long time, there's a mythology that you know by heart, you don't need to look it up to evoke. It's there in your blood, as it were.
I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.
The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe.
Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.
My poems are always about my life in one way or another.
I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.
I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.
What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous.
Writing is inherently scary.
Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.
