Back Then, I Couldn't Have Left A

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.

My Earliest Poems Were A Way Of Talking To Somebody. I Suppose To Myself.

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.

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.

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