I have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.

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.

I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.

I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.