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.

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

Poetry is a necessity of life.

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

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

Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner 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.