My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.
My poems are always about my life in one way or another.
I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.
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 of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity.
A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.
I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
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.