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

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

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

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

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

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