My Father Died When I Was Five,

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

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 Find You In These Tears, Few, Useless And Here At Last. Don't Come Back.

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

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.