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.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
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.