Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.

I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved

Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.