Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

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

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

I write what's given me to write.