Poet

I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go.

From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.

Disney made a fortune out of inventing the businessman's idea of the imaginary as the contradictory of the businessman's idea of the real.

I've always had a strong feeling for the Statue of Liberty, because it became the statue of my personal liberty.

The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.

I'm aware of my audience in a way, and I do try to engage with them while I'm trying to go about my business of thinking. I believe they help me by providing a focus.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.

My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.