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

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

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

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.

You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.

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