Maybe the culture is [particularly] shabby now. Maybe it's because I'm over sixty, that I can feel that about everything.

Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free!!

[I had a sense of interior panic].Always. I didn't really know what to call it for a long time, but I have a friend in Greece who used that word panic a lot, and I found myself resisting it, until I totally accepted that as a precise description of my interior condition. It was mostly panic from one moment to the next. And nothing much else was going on.

Women stand for the objective world for a man. They stand for the thing that you're not and that's what you always reach for in a song.

It's coming to America first, The cradle of the best and of the worst. It's here they got the range And the machinery for change And it's here they got the spiritual thirst. It's here the family's broken And it's here the lonely say That the heart has got to open In a fundamental way: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. O mighty Ship of State! To the Shores of Need Past the Reefs of Greed Through the Squalls of Hate Sail on, sail on.

I always considered myself a minor writer. My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.

I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I'm up against.