American Poetry occupies a human and cultural place where no one ever truly owns the ground. This should be the first article of common faith for those of us who define ourselves essentially as American poets, as each of us seek our own dynamics and distinctions of voice and vision. That very seeking informs the nature of our many poetic inclinations, whatever "isms" by which we abide and collide.

In characterizing the many roads and houses of American Poetry, Whitman proved an Oracle of the Obvious when he reckoned that "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." Just like the tradition of our exclusively home-made art form Jazz, American poetry--on balance--accumulates and rises to an intelligible cacophony.

Now and later, while ever a floating crap game, the sum of our national poetry at its basic best and at any given time will be that everlasting endeavor to create imaginative histories of our different lives together. In doing so, in the grand national belief that abundance is good, American Poetry assembles into an expansive model of innovation and contradition unheard of anywhere else on the planet.

Most American in all this, it strikes me, are the twin spirits of dislocation and belonging. These instincts-turned-desires tend to beget our infinite longings (both literal and figurative) for frontier-crossing, exploration, and, inevitably, the promise of new territory (whether the South Bronx, your dead father's life or the mind's blue sky) and then swing back again to a state of isolation, remeniscent of an Escher drawing of perpetual entrances and exits. The great irony: while things and attitudes American homogenize lifestyles on an international scale (fast food, film, fashion--for just one alliterative example), American Poetry continues to be relatively heterogeneous, taking the Tottel's Miscellanyapproach, putting forth a diversity of verbal identities that are distinctively and finally American in those truths and lies that collect to form and enhance our national poetic compost.

When you consider your own "tradition," do you think primarily of American poets?

American andIrish.

Do you believe there is anything specifically American about past and contemporary American poetry? Is there American poetry in the sense that there is said to be American painting or American film? Do you wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry?

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Which historic poets do you consider most responsible for generating distinctly American poetics?

Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Roethke, Wright, Brooks!

What significance does popular culture possess in your sense of American poetry?

All aspects of life belong in poetry--certainly "popular culture" through the ages.

What about the American poets who lived primarily in Europe (Eliot, Pound, Stein)? What about the European poets who have recently lived or worked in America (Heaney, Walcott, Milosz)?

All important. All feed "The American Tradition."

Are you interested in poetry written in America but not in English?

Not really. I read German.

Are you more likely to read a contemporary non-American poet who writes in English or a contemporary non-American poet translated into English?

The former.

Do other aspects of your life (for instance, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity) figure more prominently than nationality in your self-identity as a poet?

Most important is the integrity of each poem. Influences ( traditions are secondary).

Do you believe you could readily distinguish a poem by an American poet from a poem by other poets writing in English?

Yes.

What do you see as the consequences of "political correctness" for American poetry?

Restrictions could be disastrous.

What are your predictions for American poetry in the next century?

It will alwayscontinue in some form or shape.