How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

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

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

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

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

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