There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
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.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
Let's say I live to be eighty - I'm seventy-one now - nothing I do between now and eighty is going to change the way people think about my poetry.
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.
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.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
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.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories