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. |
I'm in a situation now, and I have been for ten or fifteen years, where there's no point in my being in a hurry. |
I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity. |
I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change. |
I've never known where I'm going until I've gone and come back, and then it takes me ages to see what the trip was about. |
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem. |
In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world. |
It would be nice to stumble onto one of those great projects so I could stay busy right through my dotage, but I'm not counting on it. |
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. |
Let's say I live to be eighty - I'm seventy-one now - nothing I do between now and eighty is going to change the way people think about my poetry. |
Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice. |
My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family. |
My father's life seemed and still seems utterly mysterious to me. He came alone to the States from Russia at age eleven. |
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs. |
My mother worked full-time so I was largely ungoverned, free to roam the streets of Detroit from an early age and research the poems to come, a tiny Walt Whitman going among powerful, uneducated people. |