My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
From Philip Levine
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 realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
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.
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
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