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

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

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.

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

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.

Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.

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.