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

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.

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

I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

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.

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