In addition to leading a literary life as a poet and professor of literature, you're an active jazz drummer. Are those two ways of experiencing the world — linguistic and non-linguistic — connected?

In my life, the two practices are completely separate. My jazz life is with people who don't read poetry and who are only faintly aware, if they know at all, that I'm a poet. Also the practices are different in important ways. My poet wife and I have talked about this a lot — whether jazz improvisation is much like poetic composition. We thought of the things the two have in common: the spontaneous overflows, the underlying formal structures, the aural harmonies, and more. Yes — but poetry, for me, resembles formal music composition more than it resembles jazz playing.

Jazz improvisation occurs in real time, and one hears it in real time. It is experienced by musician and listener in a real time continuum. In poetic composition, one has the advantage of suspending time, canceling and returning and rearranging time to produce the effect of a sequence of real time or a multilayered or variously complex experience in time. Jazz improvisation gives me, each time, one sequence of chances at expression.

One thing I like about poetry is that it allows me to go at any pace, approach from any direction, retreat and cancel and restore, and hopefully come out with the effect of having uttered it all with some natural ease and with some importance.

In a recent Paris Review interview, Susan Sontag describes writing as an heroic vocation. As a writer, do you feel heroic? How does your life as a writer compare to that description?

Very early, in grammar school, I got the idea that being a writer was heroic. That's really what started me. It went along with imagining I was Errol Flynn or one of the Three Musketeers, or my brother.

I had a hero brother, fifteen years my senior. He was handsome, strong, skillful at sports, fabulously successful with women, brave in the war. He had traveled throughout the world as a sailor, worked in gold mines — he did everything, it seemed to me. Also, he wrote poems and short stories.

Brave men wrote poems. By the time I recognized that my brother had crippling moral flaws and was destroying himself and blindly harming those closest to him (and was in fact a hopelessly bad writer), I had been absorbed into the writing process itself. Dick Hugo and I once talked about it: what made us writers. "All it takes is obsession," he said. Howard Nemerov, remarking on the popular Hollywoodish images of writers in romantic throes of creative ecstasy while ranting in a thunderstorm, then going back to live in a garret on booze and spaghetti, said, "I wrote this poem while sitting in my chair."

You grow up to all kinds of necessary realities, and to the writing itself, the impossible search for the ideal — you at least know the direction it lies in. That's about it. But I do think of the writers I love, including Hugo and Nemerov, as heroes.