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

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.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

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.