There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
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.
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
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.