I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.

I want to speak, to sing to total strangers. It's my way of talking to the world.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.