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

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

I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.

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

I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.

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."

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.