I was ruined before I got started. I say ruined, but I could say blessed; I was too far gone to believe in it. And I'm shocked how generation after generation repeats the behavior.

Attachment has to do with suffering, so it's really close to Buddhism, because Buddhism wants to relieve you from suffering; you're supposed to escape from suffering.

For the Christian mystics, detachment meant to leave attachment so that God could enter you and take over completely and you could climb the ladder to their heaven. Kind of crazy, but what the hell?

I floundered in my twenties. Though I wore a long scarf. And when I got to be thirty I got a job at Temple University in Philadelphia. I worked there for seven years, and I finally got fired, mostly for political reasons.

In America it's a particular problem. The artist, particularly the poet, is just unacknowledged; if I can use that dumb word. Maybe it has always been that way. Maybe the only way he or she can be acknowledged is to be connected with some movement, be it religious or political.

Some poems are art because of their passion.

Sometimes a person thinks he's attached to one thing and he's really attached to something else.