I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.

The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about whats in style, whats current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.

Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.

In the particular presence of memorable language we can find a reminder of our ability to know and retain knowledge itself: the brightness wherein all things come to see.

My devils and angels, fears and hopes, insights and stupidities, loves and loathings, are what they are. I don't edit them out so much as try to make them interesting - whether I am talking to you, or writing a poem, or joking with my kids, or speaking on television.