You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

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.

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.

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.

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

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.