Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.
When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.
So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
I read poetry to save time.
I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.
As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.