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

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

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.

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.

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