Philip Levine

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.

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.

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

Wherever I went, crowds appeared again, and I started making solo albums for the first time in my career.

As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.

Lying, stealing, and cheating are commonplace.