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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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