My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

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.

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.

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

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.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

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