If you track contemporary poetry you get the feeling that sometimes the poets--not all, but some--act as if the world came into being roughly thirty years ago. Some are comfortable writing about their relationships and little else. The past is important to me. Some of my work dwells on it, if not in it. Ideas, too: though I subscribe to Mallarme’s dictum that “poems are made with words, not ideas,” I know that ideas and intellectual problems get my imagination going.