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.

I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

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.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

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.

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