I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

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.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

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.