Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.

In this remark, Oliver frames poetry less as a credentialed career than as a daily practice of attention and transformation. The “empty basket” suggests that the poet begins not with a fixed stock of material or a professional toolkit, but with lived experience—ordinary days, losses, joys, observations. By “put[ting] your life into it,” the poet gathers what happens and what is noticed; by “mak[ing] something out of that,” the poet shapes experience into language that can be carried, shared, and re-seen. The line also resists commodifying art: the value of poetry lies in how it organizes a life toward perception, meaning, and honesty, not in external status.