Who is your favorite living poet? 

My favorite living poet is Judy Jacobs, but that’s because she’s my wife. The poets whose work I keep turning to are, at the moment, Donald Hall and Ted Kooser. I could just as easily have said Alicia Ostriker and David Kirby, or Gary Snyder, or any of dozens of others, if you had asked on a different day. I do a weekly radio show about poetry, and nearly every week I discover a new poet whose work is worthy of admiration and envy. But for the moment I keep coming back to Hall and Kooser because they write simply and well about undramatic, ordinary, everyday life, and find meaning in it.

Who is your favorite dead poet?

Today, my favorite dead poet is William Stafford. I’ve been reading his “new” collections as they come out, and trying to figure…