I Knew Life Began Where I Stood

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.

Poetry Is A Process Of Getting Back To The Unconscious. Hence, I Am Always Writing-even When I'm Not Facing The White Space. I Feel Writers Are Like Reservoirs Of Images. We Take In What Is Around Us.

Vietnam Helped Me To Look At The Horror And Terror In The Hearts Of People And Realize How We Can't Aim Guns And Set Booby Traps For People We Have Never Spoken A Word To. That Kind Of Impersonal Violence Mystifies Me.

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.

I Think Of Language As Our First Music.