My Temperament Is Not Geared To That

I Realized Poetry's The Thing That I Can Do 'cause I Can Stick At It And Work With Tremendous Intensity.

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.

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.

I'm Afraid We Live At The Mercy Of A Power, Maybe A God, Without Mercy. And Yet We Find It, As I Have, From Others.

There'll Always Be Working People In My Poems Because I Grew Up With Them, And I Am A Poet Of Memory.