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

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.

Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

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.

There is much appeal for me in Eastern religion, the little I know of it. And something thorny in me finds American adaptations of Buddhism terribly self-indulgent, silly, gooey in the way the English call "wet."

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

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.