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

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

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

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

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

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.