quotes from classic

My mother worked full-time so I was largely ungoverned, free to roam the streets of Detroit from an early age and research the poems to come, a tiny Walt Whitman going among powerful, uneducated people.

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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.

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I think Coltrane at a certain point was fabulous, and then he sort of went off into wail and shmail, and you know, you can have it.

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My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

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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.

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I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

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No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

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American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough.

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For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

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Well, don't kid yourself, I got plenty of crummy poems that I think I might use.

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I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

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Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

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But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

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My father's life seemed and still seems utterly mysterious to me. He came alone to the States from Russia at age eleven.

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When I started writing, I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to be a novelist.

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I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

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But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

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It would be nice to stumble onto one of those great projects so I could stay busy right through my dotage, but I'm not counting on it.

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I'm in a situation now, and I have been for ten or fifteen years, where there's no point in my being in a hurry.

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My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

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