I’ve been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

The meaning of life can be revealed but never explained.

I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: the creative act.

I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. I wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.

The holiness of the real
Is always there, accessible
In total immanence. The nodes
Of transcendence coagulate
In you, the experiencer,
And in the other, the lover.

Crooked cards and straight whiskey, Slow horses and fast women.

Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk‘s Well?

Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.

Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.

Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day.

Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust.

When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that’s news. If they aren’t, that’s news too.

The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.

Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.

It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.

Maturity is having the ability to escape categorization.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced… building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.

The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.