What's a word, a talisman, to hold against the world?

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years - or longer.

What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.

I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.

When I was young, I was older than I am today.