Now I Must Wait And Be Still

My Temperament Is Not Geared To That Of A Novelist.

I Believed Even Then That If I Could Transform My Experience Into Poetry I Would Give It The Value And Dignity It Did Not Begin To Possess On Its Own. I Thought Too That If I Could Write About It I Could Come To Understand It; I Believed That If I Could Understand My Life—or At Least The Part My Work Played In It—i Could Embrace It With Some Degree Of Joy, An Element Conspicuously Missing From My Life.

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.

My Mother Carried On And Supported Us; Her Ambition Had Been To Write Poetry And Songs.