When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.

I do think that the kind of writing that I do will always be around and printed in books, magazines, and now blogs.

Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such.

There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.

Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.

Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men.

The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.