My Father Died When I Was Five,

I Still Believe In This Country, That It Can Fulfill The Destiny Blake And Whitman Envisioned. I Still Believe In American Poetry.

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

My Temperament Is Not Geared To That Of A Novelist.

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.

Back Then, I Couldn't Have Left A Poem A Year And Gone Back To It.