How Weightless/ Words Are When

Listen To These Young Poets And You'll Discover The Voice Of The Present And Hear The Voice Of The Future Before The Future Is Even Here.

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.

You Have To Follow Where The Poem Leads. And It Will Surprise You. It Will Say Things You Didn't Expect To Say. And You Look At The Poem And You Realize, 'that Is Truly What I Felt.' That Is Truly What I Saw.

There'll Always Be Working People In My Poems Because I Grew Up With Them, And I Am A Poet Of Memory.

I Believed Even Then That If I Could Transform My Experience Into Poetry I Would Give It The Value And Dignity It Did Not Begin To Possess On Its Own. I Thought Too That If I Could Write About It I Could Come To Understand It; I Believed That If I Could Understand My Life—or At Least The Part My Work Played In It—i Could Embrace It With Some Degree Of Joy, An Element Conspicuously Missing From My Life.