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."

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.

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

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.

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.

Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.