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.

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

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

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.

Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

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