Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.

When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.

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

I've been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she'd found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.

Books are not men and yet they are alive.

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.

Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost, Minute by minute, day by dragging day, In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways...