My poems - like my family life, my life with friends, my teaching - these things express who I am. I don't feel any extra responsibilities or relishes or necessary evils in them. They are part of who I am, with all of those customary desires and doubts, purposes and confusions that come along with being a particular person.

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.

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.

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.

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.