It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.
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.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.
Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
I don't think anybody is a poet 24/7, only in those rare moments when a person is producing a poem.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.