I've been writing poetry since I was five, and I have no idea why. I do not come from a bookish family. We were the children and grandchildren of immigrants who left the Roman and Sicilian countryside to make a life in coal-mining country in northeastern Pennsylvania. (As you see, my parents had a mixed marriage.) None of my people were school people. They learned as much as they needed to know before going off to work in the mines, the factory, the lunch counter at Woolworth's, the beauty salon, each job with each generation coming closer to the goal of becoming genteel. My Aunt Mary, who spent half her life bent over a sewing machine doing piece work, cried the day she left school behind at the end of fifth grade. She loved it in a way she would never love the dress factory.
I felt lucky. I...
