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

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.

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

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."

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

The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

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.