The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.

The Lesson You've Got to learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth's bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Other than myself, of course. I've made a study of bearing and forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and note those faces passing by: Not one's a god.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.

I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.

But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me... and go on living without me.