Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.

A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.

I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."

Our government is a bird with two right wings... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.

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

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.