But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

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

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

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

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

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

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.