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.

You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.

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

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

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

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

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.