I Like Connecting The Abstract To The

It Wasn't A Deliberate Decision To Become A Poet. It Was Something I Found Myself Doing - And Loving. Language Became An Addiction.

I Like What Oliver Lakes Does On The Saxophone. The Saxophone Comes Pretty Close To The Sound Of The Human Voice And When Oliver Plays With Other Sax Players, It's Like A Dialogue.

There's A Sameness About American Poetry That I Don't Think Represents The Whole People. It Represents A Poetry Of The Moment, A Poetry Of Evasion, And I Have Problems With This. I Believe Poetry Has Always Been Political, Long Before Poets Had To Deal With The Page And White Space . . . It's Natural.

I Define Poetry As Celebration And Confrontation. When We Witness Something, Are We Responsible For What We Witness? That's An On-going Existential Question. Perhaps We Are And Perhaps There's A Kind Of Daring, A Kind Of Necessary Energetic Questioning. Because Often I Say It's Not What We Know, It's What We Can Risk Discovering.

It Took Me 14 Years To Write Poems About Vietnam. I Had Never Thought About Writing About It, And In A Way I Had Been Systematically Writing Around It.