I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.