There are books all around me… I don’t read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.
Read
I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.
Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.
I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.
Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don’t read books.
Don’t patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he’s stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
I’m very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.