I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

I write what's given me to write.

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

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.

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

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.