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.
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.
American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough.
Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
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.