You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

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

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.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

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.

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

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.