I Was Very Lucky To

Some Things You Know All Your Life. They Are So Simple And True They Must Be Said Without Elegance, Meter And Rhyme...they Must Be Naked And Alone, They Must Stand For Themselves.

You Have Begun To Separate The Dark From The Dark.

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 Mother Carried On And Supported Us; Her Ambition Had Been To Write Poetry And Songs.

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.