I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

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.

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

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