An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond... a good feeling about his art.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

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

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.