I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

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

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

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

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

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