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.
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
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.
