If she were writing by candlelight she would now be in the dark, for a living flame would refuse to be fed by such pure exhaustion. Actually she is in the dark, for the.

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

The earth drinks all that’s left of you and asks for more.

Back then, I couldn’t have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

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

I realized poetry’s the thing that I can do ’cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

Don’t scorn your life just because it’s not dramatic, or it’s impoverished, or it looks dull, or it’s workaday. Don’t scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you’ve got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open.” – Philip Levine, describing what he learned from William Carlos Williams, via NPR.

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

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.

To be alone then, hearing only breeze, your own breath rising to answer with words you didn’t know you knew the pale questions of the full moon, to know for the first time you are without a name or number.