We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.

Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.

If you're going to be a writer you should sit down and write in the morning, and keep it up all day, every day. Charles Bukowski, no matter how drunk he got the night before or no matter how hungover he was, the next morning he was at his typewriter. Every morning. Holidays, too. He'd have a bottle of whiskey with him to wake up with, and that's what he believed. That's the way you became a writer: by writing. When you weren't writing, you weren't a writer.

We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.

You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. [...] You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.

Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.