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.

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

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

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.

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

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