I'm going home the old way with a light hand on the reins making the long approach.

To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.

When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old

Here on the drawing board fingers and noses leak from the air brush maggots lie under if i should die before if i should die in the back room stacked up in smooth boxes like soapflakes or tunafish wait the undreamt of.

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

Can it be I am the only Jew residing in Danville, Kentuchy, looking for matzoh in the Safeway and the A & P?

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place - in this culture - to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best.