The problem with American democracy is the American corporation, which is a slave holder construct, pure and simple. It's totally invasive, and people are as tightly controlled within the walls of a corporation as they are in a totalitarian society.

I'm a staunch civil libertarian; I really believe that the individual is more important than any societal value.

I don't think that brutality and idealism are mutually exclusive. It's a common denominator in my work - rabid idealism.

Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ('composing in real time') with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now.

I'm truly an outsider in the poetry world. When I started writing, I was trying to move my poems away from modernist lines.

If there is anything unique about my writing it is the way that I combine poetry and prose, not just on the level of having a poem here, prose there, but that it really is a true amalgam.