Everyone in their car needs love.

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.

It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.

One opinion I share with the Dadaists is that art-making presupposes a revolutionary state of mind. Assimilating the practice into commodity or symbol of status nullifies its fundamental aims; therefore at the center of my own adherence to to this ranginess in taste is that it doesn't add up to membership in a private club. The differences choose me. There are so many approaches, so many innovative moves, so many oddly shaped ears in the field; may they never sing in unison.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

Poetry is a necessity of life.

I have taught the long poem off and on for years. The more book-length poems I read and studied and taught the more interested I was in the possibilities in writing a poetry that applied formal and substantive options of narrative and non-narrative, lyric and non-lyric. I found many pleasures in this kind of writing. The long poem is as old as the art form.