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I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.

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

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.