"I always go back and read Jack Kerouac because I think he's great and of course, Clark Coolidge, who's a visitor from Mars, he's the cat's pajamas. I think language poetry helped me a lot when I first discovered it in the late '70's early '80's but now I see how that's dead-ending itself too. There's nobody behind it. You go from one extreme to the other. You can see some crossed-eyed dipshit writing a poem in Antaeus, right, you don't want to read it. Or you can look at some of these magazines in which every one of them's a language poem. You don't know who the fuck's behind it and you don't care. It looks like a print-out or something and anyone could have written those poems. From one extreme to the other. I think there's a happy medium. I think a smart writer takes from anywhere, from TV, to St. Jerome to the latest thing that's happening and makes it, finds a comfortable place for himself."

from Brian Schorn's 1991 interview with Michael Gizzi