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I like poems that are complex.

I like poems that inspire, that make us think and reflect. It's like putting love into the world for whoever picks it up.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.

The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.

I like poems where you don't really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them.