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

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

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

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

Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.