One Writes A Poem When

Writing Is A Job, A Craft, And You Learn It By Trying To Write Every Day And By Facing The Page With Humility And Gall. And You Have To Love To Read Books, All Kinds Of Books, Good Books. You Are Not Looking For Anything In Particular; You Are Just Letting Stuff Seep In.

I'm Reading A Manuscript By Rodney Jones, "village Prodigies",it's One Of The Best Contemporary Poetry Books I've Ever Read Ever.

I Had A Period When I Read Nobel Prize Winners. I Figured They Had To Be Good. I Discovered Some People I Didn't Know About, Like The Icelandic Writer Halldor Laxness, Who Wrote "independent People." .

I Majored In English In College And That Was My Major In Graduate School Before Switching To Creative Writing. I Read A Lot Of [charles] Dickens And [anthony ] Trollope, But There Was Lots Of Stuff I Hadn't Read Like Thackeray's "vanity Fair," Which Is So Well Written And Funny.

I Never Read Ford Madox Ford's "the Good Soldier." I've Been Reading Books That I Should Have Read Years Ago And Did Not. That's One Of Them.