American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

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

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

I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

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

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.