As a younger person you can come in through many, many gateways. It's like some huge Mandela. You can enter into this and get refreshed.

There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.

The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.

I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show.

There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them. And it can be grand and vast and you can create a realm where you can dwell for a while. Where things are perfect symbols of themselves, no manipulation. And that connects to me to the Buddhist view. From that perspective we can wake up on the spot, be conscious of our world, think of others.