How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

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.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

I write what's given me to write.

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