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.

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

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

I write what's given me to write.

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 started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.