I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.

I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.

I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.