Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

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

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

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.

I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them.

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.

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