I Was Very Lucky To Have A

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.

But Most Commonly, It's One Poem That I Work On With A Lot Of Intensity.

How Weightless/ Words Are When Nothing Will Do.

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.

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.