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

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.

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

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

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.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.