American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough. |
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. |
Detroit was just a Levine-size town. |
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion. |
I don't know how much the music has influenced my writing; I know it's inspired me, and the young jazz musicians I went to school with in Detroit, Kenny Burrell, Pepper Adams, Bess Bonier, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, were the first people I knew who were living the creative lives of artists. |
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 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 think in the best poems I make a lot of discoveries about voice, about subject, about what my real feelings are. |
I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and I'd get these genius ideas for novels and try to finish then in three or four days without going to sleep. |
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet. |
I write what's given me to write. |