The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

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My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

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For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

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No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

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There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

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

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I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

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Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

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I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

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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.

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