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I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

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.

I was quite a reader before I became a writer.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.