My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote. |
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist. |
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you. |
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. |
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. |
Well, don't kid yourself, I got plenty of crummy poems that I think I might use. |
When I started writing, I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to be a novelist. |