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.

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

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

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

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

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

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.