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

The ancient Greek "oral poets" all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the muse to help them remember.

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

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

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.

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.