I write what's given me to write.

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.

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

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.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.