One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

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

I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

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.

Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.