If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

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.

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.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

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

The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.