Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

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

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

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.

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.