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

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

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.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

I write what's given me to write.

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