Back Then, I Couldn't Have Left A

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.

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.

I Was Very Lucky To Have A Mother Who Encouraged Me To Become A Poet.

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.