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.

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

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

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

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

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

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

I write what's given me to write.

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

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.