There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
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.
I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.
I write what's given me to write.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.