I don’t remember which writer said this, but in an interview, a prolific novelist was asked, “Do you write only when you’re inspired, or do you write all the time? Do you wait for the muse, or do you just kind of knock it out? You can just sort of spin it out?” And he said, “Well, I do wait for the muse. I write when the muse comes, but fortunately she shows up, like me, every day at 9:00 a.m.

I did it because that’s what it was going to take. I really wanted it. I had an older brother, and he was bigger and smarter, and when you’re a kid, you’re trying to catch up all the time. I think that that’s where it kind of came from, just that little brother syndrome. I was just trying to be something, trying to make myself worth something. It was proving it to other people and proving it to myself at the same time. I needed that.

There is no getting around the work requirement. Also, the creative side is only part of the work. I work really hard.

Well, the reason I’ve survived for this long is because any film composer that has an extended career learns to work within deadlines. The deadline becomes the motivating factor in the same way that a pro athlete can do these incredible things with two seconds left in the game. It forces them into their best mode. For film composers, the clock does get us into a higher gear.

Yes, because it seems to me that poetry cannot be hermetically closed to thinking. And thinking always enters the field of contradiction. So it also has to do with the way I try to reconcile poetry versus thinking. … I think you’re right that for many American poets, poetry is almost an escape from the cruelty of thinking, from the choices you make when you think. Escaping your life—which may be tragic, but it’s not problematic. So I see it differently, as a necessity to confront these categories.

Generally, my hours are during the first part of the day; hardly ever in the evening. The hours nearer noon, the zenith of the day, are good for working.

This is a French expression, silence radio, which is used in the navy, for example—when you cannot use the radio because the enemy is near. It’s not an expression I use regularly; I used it once, maybe, to describe my period of inner silence, which mostly happens when I’m back home, coming from Houston. The long weeks or months of silence. So it’s the opposite of inspiration; it’s the time of doing other things. Waiting.

But it seems to me that I’m somebody who is deeply skeptical and trying to combat this skepticism. So my writing is probably situated somewhere between the poles of skepticism and ecstasy, with my dream being to have more ecstatic poems.

Well, that’s the optimistic reading of it, which you are never able to apply when it happens. You can read it this way when it’s over. Rationally speaking, it’s a period that’s needed, because the danger for every poet, I think, is to write too much. So these are the blessed moments of silence, protecting you from writing too many poems, diluting you and what you have to say in a stream of banal poems. It’s necessary, but still very painful, because I just don’t know what to do if I don’t write poems. I still survive, but it is painful.

The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.