I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

I do believe that we've a responsibility to try to acknowledge the range, both geographic and graphic, of what's happening in poetry in English. I'm interested in poems that are first-rate. After that, I'm not too concerned if they come from Queens or Queensland.

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

One is constantly trying to figure out what came together in one's childhood. Lots of people spend significant portions of their lives in therapy - especially in the States - trying to work out who they are. I'm certain there is a little of that in the business of writing. That would explain why certain images and themes recur.