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

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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.

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.

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

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.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.