We can think for ourselves and we can awaken the world to a greater consciousness.

I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I'd say. Allen please, it's not politically correct.

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

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

In a way, America's the shadow of everything I do, everywhere I go, everything I carry, no matter if I travel to the ends of the earth. And I live frequently on the spine of the continent, near the Great Divide. Then there's the side of it being the real energy center for a truly post-postmodernist poetry mind, which is also archaic, because we can still be close to the land.

I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.

My love of poetry comes from the "actualization" I experienced in the poetry of others. And I was reading it silently and there is deep pleasure in that intimacy, a mind-to-mind transfer going on. All the music is there, inherently. And mystery as well.