“IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung--for one reason alone--because it works.A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing--measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era--we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas. ”

“Poetry has an immediate effect on the mind. The simple act of reading poetry alters thought patterns and the shuttle of the breath. Poetry induces trance. Its words are chant. Its rhythms drumbeats. Its images become the icons of the inner eye. Poetry is more than a description of the sacred experience; it carries the experience itself.”

“One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.”

“The measure of one's love for good poetry and for good music is the hatred, the violent hatred, one feels for bad poetry and bad music.”

“Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.”

“Both money and art powdered as they are with the romance and poetry of the age are magic. Rather money is magic art is magik. Money is stagecraft slight of hand a bag of clever tricks. Art is a plexus of forces and influences that act upon the senses by means of practical yet permanently inexplicable secret links. Admittedly the line between the two can be as thin as a dime.”