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

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

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

Poetry is a necessity of life.

Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.

I think a book-length poem stands about as good a chance as a collection of individual poems in reaching its field of ears. This does not mean I have not found some of them too daunting to read all the way through, but it would seem there ought to be some ambition on the writer's part to create a work that would be "a read" all the way through. If not, all the pleasure belongs to the maker, and that in itself is something, an achievement.

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