My mother started taking us to church when I was in seventh or eight grade. That was always a question, Do you believe in God?

For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.

What I'm after is that wakeful state through language that stays alive.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them.

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

I had parents who were attentive to what was going on politically. There was the Greek connection, a sense of a larger world. People coming in from abroad. There was a sense of community around ideas: a discourse and an adhesiveness which is my favorite word from [Walt] Whitman.