Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
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.
I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.