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

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

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

I think that life is incredibly violent and that individual people are incredibly violent on one level or another. I don't try to change life to suit my writing; in a certain way I'm a naturalist of the nineteenth century school.

I'm a centrist. There is a lot going on socially that I don't like, but I feel that in a democracy you work from the center, not because I like the center - I'm a marginalized person politically - but because the center is where things get done.

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.