It’s common knowledge that writing poetry does not usually pay well, and its effects are often ephemeral; your poem, “Letter to a Gifted Student,” is a sober, almost cautionary-tale-look at writing. Could you comment on the opening lines, “Know this is first: the gift is worthless/ you’ve been unwrapping all these years”?

“Letter to a Gifted Student” is a dark poem, though not altogether so. Remember the tear at the end is the “necessary tear.” The poem is perhaps a kind of warning about what real poetry requires. There’s a lot of fake poetry around though I am aware that nobody is supposed to say so.

If someone should say to me, “How can you tell if a poem is fake?” I would give the answer Louis Armstrong gave when somebody asked something similar about jazz. “If you gotta ask, you ain’t never going to know.” But that’s an aside. Real poetry asks everything of the writer. There is little in the way of tangible reward. The whole “po’ biz” machine is absurd, really. Rewards are given but not always for real poetry; and the rewards are small indeed compared to, say, selling houses or starting a band. Knowing how serious and how talented this student was, and how tough the competition for publication and for readers and how skewed the standards can be depending on academic connections, self-promotion, literary politics — I simply wrote a warning not to expect the world to give a damn but to go on writing. Tim McBride is an outsider to the literary world, a situation I understand. I’m happy to say, however, that his first book is due out from Northwestern University Press in the spring. I still tell my students to continue writing poetry only if they have to; if they cannot imagine life without it; if it is a way of seeing that is essential to them for its own sake, even if they never publish, never teach.

When did you begin writing?

I don’t remember NOT writing, at least once I learned to make letters. My fifth-grade teacher told me once, after I had grown up, that she used to catch me writing “poems” while holding up my geography book to hide what I was doing. It seems to be what I have always done.

Which writers do you especially admire and why?

I am actually going to try and answer this question. But it becomes absurd because there are so many, and from so many periods. Even limiting it to the 20th century and beyond would be too much. The poets who meant most to me when I was very young and finding everything for myself were Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Robinson Jeffers. I admire rich, expansive language, and also the controlled short form. I love narrative and lyric and any well-made combination of those. This was in the late fifties, early sixties and none of the three were in fashion. Here’s the benefit of learning without classrooms — you get to discover the ones you need. The first two were for passion and music, the third, Jeffers, was a revelation on many levels. He remains the most important poet to me. Then there was George Herbert, and Dickinson, Hardy, Warren, Dickey, Kumin, Kinnell, Merwin, Roethke, Plath and early Hughes (I am a politically incorrect reader) and more, more — each different reasons, different rewards. I could add Nemerov, underappreciated I think, and other less known poets like Adrienne Stoutenburg and Eleanor Ross Taylor.

I admire rich, expansive language, and also the controlled short form. I love narrative and lyric and any well-made combination of those. I can note the books read in the last several months that I admire right now: Usher by B. H. Fairchild; re-read Song by Brigit Pegeen Kelly; Figure Studies: Poems by Claudia Emerson; Messenger by Ellen Bryant Voigt; Pictures of the Afterlife by Jude Nutter; re-read Fields of Praise by Marilyn Nelson. Next month there will be others. What I ask of poetry is clarity, passion, a logic of metaphor, and above all, the music without which poetry is only prose broken into lines.