“My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yoursel...” — Philip Levine Quote

“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.”

“If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.”

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

“You may take this as a general and central principle in criticism: that all science, literature or song, which recognizes conscious life as the ruling principle of the universe, is Christian.”

“I will now be very mindful about it, and if I feel like I've been on my phone too much one day, I'm going to be more conscious of that and not be so obsessed.”

“Not strict, no - but I've always been very conscious about just being healthy and taking care of myself.”