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

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.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

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.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

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