David Antin

"When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience."

"The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin."

"While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song."

"I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do."