Poet

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.

I have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.

Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.

While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I'd already written. And I didn't want to be an actor.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.

My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

I reserve the right to tell shaggy dog stories or even common jokes as part of what I'm doing. I don't give a damn if half the audience walks out.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.

You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.