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

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

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

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

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.

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.