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

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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

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

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

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