Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.
My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it.
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.
It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel.
I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.
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.
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.
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 tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.
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 have spoken to expert audiences occasionally, but then no audience is expert over the whole range of things I want to explore.
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
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.
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.
From this entertainment industry, may the gods of language protect us.
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.
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.
