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

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.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

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

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

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.