I'm Afraid We Live At

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.

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.

But I'm Too Old To Be Written About As A Young Poet.

I'm Seventy-one Now, So It's Hard To Imagine A Dramatic Change.

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.