I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.