The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

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

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.

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."

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.