We Have To Embrace The

My Great-grandfather Melvin Had Been A Carpenter - So Was My Father - And They Taught Me The Value Of Tools: Saws, Hammers, Chisels, Files And Rulers. It All Dealt With Conciseness And Precision. It Eliminated Guesswork. One Has To Know His Tools, So He Doesn't Work Against Himself.

Students Often Have Such A Lofty Idea Of What A Poem Is, And I Want Them To Realize That Their Own Lives Are Where The Poetry Comes From. The Most Important Things Are To Respect The Language; To Know The Classical Rules, Even If Only To Break Them; And To Be Prepared To Edit, To Revise, To Shape.

I Like Connecting The Abstract To The Concrete. There's A Tension In That. I Believe The Reader Or Listener Should Be Able To Enter The Poem As A Participant. So I Try To Get Past Resolving Poems.

Poetry Is A Kind Of Distilled Insinuation. It's A Way Of Expanding And Talking Around An Idea Or A Question. Sometimes, More Actually Gets Said Through Such A Technique Than A Full Frontal Assault.

I Excavate History. I Look At Lives Buried Under Too Much Silence. Periods Of Time, Like Slavery, Have To Be Revisited, Reimagined, So We Can Move Through Them.