I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

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.

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

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.