I like what Oliver Lakes does on the saxophone. The saxophone comes pretty close to the sound of the human voice and when Oliver plays with other sax players, it’s like a dialogue.

Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can’t aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.

Now I have beaten a song back into you, rise and walk away like a panther.

My great-grandfather Melvin had been a carpenter – so was my father – and they taught me the value of tools: saws, hammers, chisels, files and rulers. It all dealt with conciseness and precision. It eliminated guesswork. One has to know his tools, so he doesn’t work against himself.

It wasn’t a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing – and loving. Language became an addiction.

I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there’s an ongoing evolution of clarity.

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There’s a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one’s personal project.

I close my eyes and can see men drawing lines in the dust. America pushes through the membrane of mist and smoke, and I’m a small boy again in Bogalusa.

Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I’m not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us.