My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.