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

We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.

I tried to think of my knowledge, but it was a squirrel's heap of winter nuts. There was no strength in my knowledge any more and I felt small and naked as a new-hatched bird.

Sometimes a sign or a quote is simply interesting by itself and does not require anything beyond being framed on a page.

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.

Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexxed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color or theory.

I don't think I have ever really gotten Leopold Bloom's interior ramblings out of my head! I am sure that voice continues to inspire the walking consciousness in my work - that is, the way I carry on an interior monologue as I walk through this city.