There's that older poem of John Ashbery's-"America"-with the pun "I'm a wrecker," so wreckage and building out of the ashes of that. We're haunted by the genocide that is America, the decimation of so many native cultures. As a mix-blood European ancestry American, you're a nexus of all those violences, and yet there's a relative personal identity as well.

I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.

The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years.

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

Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.

What I propose for the "life of a poet" goes against the grain of the fossil fuel monoculture. Maybe the most revolutionary act these days is not to watch television and to read a book a day at least.

I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation.