I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

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

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

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

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

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

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.