I was a piano major in college before things happened and I took up poetry instead. Which is actually just as cool; the instrument is portable and extremely cheap. It has all the elements of jazz. Every syllable is a beat, every consonant is a point of percussion and every vowel sound is a string, a horn or a woodwind. Well, I would not have been able to play my music if I had not had rooms in which to practice. Closets of loneliness, the far back platform bed in a Suburban

I have become a poet. I have only this. I am not a poet because I have won the Pulitzer Prize or published fourteen books. I know that I am a poet because I have accepted that my heart bleeds rhythm and because I have seen that this rhythm is real as bongos; it is heard, felt, thought, walked, danced, performed and lived. It gives me strength, that same strength, hilariously, that can be handed in purple penmanship to that girl, that kid, that little old lady. Poetry is not a

If you are lost in the tonnage of a collapse, what good is a voice if you do not develop the intensity of creativity to get your voice to the surface? To save yourself? To save the people lost with you? The planet groans with exhaustion. Marching in protest only seems to incite more violence and confusion. But we can join the march, the performance, the ride, the battle, or the journey. We can be part of the Play! No single poet is going to sandbag the intensity of the raging

Why aren’t poets perfectly clear? Why do we have to be so difficult, or stupid, either too plain or pompous? What is it with poetry in the Euro-American tradition? Why does it sometimes sound like a pileup on the freeway? And what about that rap? What’s up with that? I have thought about the evolution of syllables, like the origin of culture. EuroAm science says humans arrived as the mitosis of a chemical anomaly. One chunk of religion says we descended directly out of an unm