In my books and in romance as a genre there is a positive uplifting feeling that leaves the reader with a sense of encouragement and hope for a brighter future - or a brighter present.

Aside from sales the letters from readers have been primarily positive.

As writers and readers as sinners and citizens our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

I don't want to force my politics on my readers.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that though lacking a novel's length satisfies the reader.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife who was very smart about poetry.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry but obviously like everybody I have a set of criteria for reading poems and I'm not shy about presenting them so if people ask for my critical response to a poem I tell them what works and why and what doesn't work and why.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry as such.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world then it has had its desired effect.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting unstable and interactive.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.