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Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

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.

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.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.

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've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.

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.