I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

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.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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

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

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.