I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

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

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

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able.